Column | Art is a pool of feeling

‘Le Théâtre des émotions’ is the name of the exhibition that lures me to Paris. ‘Emotion theatre’. Correct. Recalls that art uses theatrical display. And that all art, including the abstract, is about what we see. To experience. To endure. To feel.

Bee Musee Marmottan Monet they take it educationally, with captions teaching that medieval artists did not show what was stirring inside someone, but used symbols to indicate feelings. sadness? Then there are tears, or a handkerchief. But apart from the prominent handkerchief in the Brussels portrait Sainte Madeleine and Pleurs (c. 1525) I see real sadness. Suppressed, but unmistakable, and so beautiful. Love? In wedding double portraits, the man and woman have love attributes in their hands (she a flower, he a marriage contract), with neutral faces. But this is realism. No love, it’s arranged marriages. And where is Breughel anyway, with all his exuberant types?

Well, don’t complain, just enjoy. In the following centuries the painted emotions do indeed take on more exuberant form, with a keen eye for mimicry and body language† Sadness remains a favorite. Love and infatuation often become kitsch. Anger too. And now the exhibition is adding explicit merriment, with the famous jubilant painting by a young woman on the swing of Fragonard†

There is another painting of him, a small one, about a completely different emotion: horniness. It is called Le Verrou (1777). ‘The lock’. That lock is a bolt, high on the door. While a man’s left arm restrains a woman, a right man’s index finger wants to slide that latch shut. The woman also tries to reach the lock, her hand is on its way, without a chance. This painting is a pool of feeling. It combines the violence of lust with the terror of it. They explode together, in that little bolt and those reaching fingers.

I walk past the permanent collection and see a fragile painting by Berthe Morisot: and ball† ‘at the ball’† Morisot painted nervousness: a young woman in a ballgown, with flight forward in every pore. Her future depended on the success of such a ball (see The Gilded Age, the über-lush HBO series about New York’s “nobility,” circa 1900). This is total emotion-theatre, subdued and shocking.