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Manet, The Repose , 1870, Rhode Island School of Design.    Berthe Morisot is at rest, but the seascape behind her could symbolize an inner restlessness behind her calm demeanor.  Why hasn't the love story of painters Édouard Manet and Berthe Morisot been told in film?  (Both Manet and Morisot are represented in large numbers at the exhibition, Imp ressionism, Fashion and Modernity , formerly at Musée d' Orsay, but no w at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC and onto the Art Institu te of Chicago this s ummer.  M orisot was the sub ject of a large retrospective at Musée Mar mottan Monet, Paris , last year , and her work , like much Impressionism, is so much better when viewed in real life rather than reproduction.) Manet, a "people person" and painter of people, is the one artist of the past I would wish to meet above all others.  Morisot, one of his muses, is the artist with whom I empathize more than any other.  She loved in a painful way,...

Rosamond Purcell, Field of the Cloth of Gold , 2010 A group of pictures in the Folger Shakespeare Library’s exhibition this past fall, Very Like A Whale, fooled me.   I thought artist Rosamond Purcell’s medium was some inventive watercolor, ink or acrylic technique.   Was the room too dark, or are my eyes are going bad?   To my surprise these pictures were photographs! It was an imaginative way to portray Shakespeare, and artist whose myriads of visions who give us such a breadth of humanity.   Very Like a Whale took its exhibition name from a quote in Hamlet showing the human ability of interpreting single objects in multiple ways.   (Hamlet and Polonius saw different images in the same cloud.) Purcell curated the show, along with Shakespeare scholar and Folger Director Michael Witmore. This pair also collaborated on a book , Landscapes of the Passing Strange , using her photographic images with evocative quotations from Shakespeare. This great review is b...