She is there, stretched out, in her black lace; her pale face shines against a background of red and gold brocades. Berthe Morisot, by Edouard Manet… ” Their eyes (…) were almost too vast, and so powerfully obscure, that Manet (…)to fix all the dark and magnetic force, painted them black instead of the greenish that they were, thus Paul Valéry describes the painter and model.
When the Marmottan-Monet Museum invited the artist Anne Laure Sacriste as part of her “Unexpected Dialogues” project with its collections, this small painting, entitled Portrait of Berthe Morisot lying down, loves her immediately. “All of Manet’s portraits of Berthe Morisot are magnificent, full of his love for the woman who married his brother Eugène. They speak of a desire that could not be expressed and it is around this missing part that I imagined my exhibition”.
To compose it, with the help of art historian Valérie Da Costa, she studied the astonishing history of this canvas painted in 1873. “Originally, Manet had depicted the entire body of Berthe, languid on a sofa. Then he decided to cut the canvas, leaving only the face. » Some say he was dissatisfied with the design of his sitter’s hand.
Anne Laure Sacriste favors another explanation: “Lying down like this, Berthe seemed too generous, like a disrespectful casserole. This gesture of cutting the canvas only accentuates this impression of a repressed desire. » To answer this question, she created a photogravure based on this portrait, with the help of an engraver in Switzerland. But she slightly shifted the image, “to make it almost ghostly, with its missing part too”.
Around this pas de deux, the artist orchestrates an exhibition full of restraints and silences, thresholds and tensions: a “Chinese portrait with multiple layers, both of Berthe and of this repressed desire. An exhibition all in black and white, too, to highlight the portrait of Manet, and which plays on minimalist things, so as not to be confronted with the impressive golden frame which surrounds the Manet.
Nourished by several residencies in Japan, which have been, for her, so many revelations over the past ten years, Anne Laure Sacriste plays with invisible details, with punctuations, as she was able to do when she was invited to exhibit in a Zen garden in Kyoto, a few years ago. In the center of the room of the Marmottan Museum dedicated to it, an enormous ceramic turtle sits: the artist called it Berthe. Modeled with the help of a ceramist from Strasbourg, covered with matte and shiny enamels brought from Kyoto, it was born from the teaching received from Japanese masters.
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