ECR French Nineteenth-Century Art Network presents:
Curatorial Roundtable: Manet: A Model Family
Thursday 21 November 1600 (GMT) // 1700 (CET) // 1100 (EST) // 0800 (PST)
Every artist has their muses. For Édouard Manet (1832–1883), one of those muses was family. But the home life of the French painter was complicated, even by today’s standards. Manet: A Model Family, on view at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, from 10 October 2024–20 January 2025, explores how despite complexities between relatives, the Manet family lived happily—from a wife who had once been in the household’s employ, to a child of questionable paternity, to a mother who disinherited Édouard’s surviving kin. They were also the artist’s most frequent models, a crucial source of financial and emotional support, as well as creative inspiration. Immortalized in groundbreaking bold brushstrokes, Édouard Manet's loved ones enriched his life and his art. After his death, they cultivated his legacy and ensured that his work would never be forgotten.
Manet: A Model Family at the Gardner Museum is the first exhibition to explore Manet through the lens of the complex familial relationships between and amongst the artist and his sitters, shedding new light on the life and masterpieces of the “father of modernism.”
This network session will offer an opportunity to learn about the landmark exhibition Manet: A Model Family. It will provide a glimpse onto some of the original research that has gone into the exhibition; the curatorial decisions and collaborations that have informed the conception and presentation of the exhibition; as well as the partnerships forged in the securing of unique loans to the exhibition. We will be joined by exhibition curator, Diana Seave Greenwald, William and Lia Poorvu Curator of the Collection at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum; Kathryn Kremnitzer, PhD, Vice President, Director, Head of Sale, 19th-Century European Paintings, Sotheby’s New York; and conservator Gianfranco Pocobene, Principal of Gianfranco Pocobene Studio.
Diana Seave Greenwald is an art historian and economic historian. Her work uses both statistical and qualitative analyses to explore the relationship between art and broader social and economic change during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly in the United States and France. Diana’s first book, Painting by Numbers: Data-Driven Histories of Nineteenth-Century Art, was published by Princeton University Press in 2021. She is currently the William and Lia Poorvu Curator of the Collection at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. At the Gardner she has written, co-authored, or edited four exhibition catalogs and books: Betye Saar: Heart of A Wanderer (2023, editor), Fellow Wanderer: Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Travel Albums (2023, co-editor with Casey Riley), Isabella Stewart Gardner: A Life (2022, co-authored with Nathaniel Silver), and Isabella Stewart Gardner: Dog Lover (2020). Prior to joining the Gardner, she was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., working in the departments of American and British Paintings and Modern Prints and Drawings. She received a D.Phil. in History from the University of Oxford. She was co-supervised by Professor Kevin O’Rourke and Professor Michael Hatt (University of Warwick). Before doctoral study, Diana earned an M.Phil. in Economic and Social History from Oxford and a Bachelor’s degree in Art History from Columbia University.
Kathryn Kremnitzer joined Sotheby’s in June 2021. She earned her PhD at Columbia University in 2020 with a dissertation that explored how Édouard Manet worked across media in the 1860s. She was previously Research Associate in the Painting and Sculpture of Europe department at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she worked on Manet and Modern Beauty (2019), Monet and Chicago (2020), and Cezanne (2022), and contributed to the online scholarly catalogue of Manet’s works in the collection. As a Curatorial Assistant at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, she worked on Madame Cézanne (2014) and Tiepolo Caricatures from the Robert Lehman Collection (2014). She specializes in 19th-century European painting, particularly French, and works on paper.
Gianfranco Pocobene is Principal of Gianfranco Pocobene Studio, a private practice specializing in the conservation of paintings and murals. He received his Master of Arts in Conservation in 1984 from Queen’s University, and his forty years of experience include fifteen years at the Harvard Art Museums and twenty years at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. At the Gardner he led the conservation department as the John L. and Susan K. Gardner Chief Conservator and also served as its Chief Paintings and Research Conservator where he carried out numerous technical studies and treatments including works by Fra Angelico, Simone Martini, Botticelli, Velázquez, Crivelli, Titian, Degas, Sargent and Manet. While working on Harvard’s University collection, he oversaw the restoration of mural cycles at the Boston Public Library by Puvis de Chavannes, Edwin Austin Abbey and John Singer Sargent and co-edited and co-authored the 2010 publication, John Singer Sargent’s Triumph of Religion Murals at the Boston Public Library: Creation and Restoration.