Manet at the Morgan: A Processing Project

In 1974, the Morgan purchased a large collection of materials related to the painter Édouard Manet from the American scholar Mina Kirstein Curtiss. Curtiss had acquired them in Paris in the 1950s from Lucienne Tabarant, the daughter of the art historian and journalist Adolphe Tabarant, who published an early catalogue raisonné of Manet’s work, Manet: Histoire catalographique (1931), as well as other important texts on Manet and on the Impressionists. According to the Manet scholar Juliet Wilson-Bareau, this collection (known since its acquisition as the Tabarant Collection or the Tabarant Archive) was originally part of a larger group of papers inherited by Manet’s widow Suzanne and her son Léon Leenhoff. At some point, Leenhoff seems to have divided the papers between Tabarant and Etienne Moreau-Nélaton, another art historian. Moreau-Nélaton’s section of the materials went to the Bibliothèque nationale de France in 1927. But the Tabarant Archive came to the United States instead.

When it arrived at the Morgan in the early ‘70s, it was accompanied by an inventory that had been prepared by Liliane Yacoel Ziegel, Mina Curtiss’s research assistant. Perhaps because of the existence of this inventory or the complexity or size of the collection, which included books from Manet’s library, extensively annotated albums containing photographs of his paintings, his only surviving sketchbook, letters, documents, and many, many other items, the Morgan curatorial and cataloging staff did not comprehensively process the archive on its acquisition. All of the bound materials were cataloged, but most of the letters and documents (nearly 400 items) in the collection were not. The inventory describing them reflected an idiosyncratic organizational system of boxes and dossiers, in which a letter by Claude Monet could be filed in any one of several boxes. Over the years, it became increasingly difficult to find items, even though the collection is relatively small, compared to other archival collections at the Morgan and elsewhere. And because the letters and documents did not have individual catalog records, they could not be easily searched for in the Morgan’s catalog CORSAIR or union catalogs.

In 2019, Christine Nelson, the former Drue Heinz Curator, suggested that I tackle this project as part of my work for the department of Literary and Historical Manuscripts. In 2024, after five tumultuous and busy years at the museum, I completed it.

There were a lot of issues to reckon with: one of them was the fact that as the collection passed from owner to owner, it accrued materials, which were not distinguished from the original core. So, for instance, the collection contained a whole series of letters from the painter Camille Pissarro to the pastry chef Eugène Murer, who was an early collector of Impressionist art and friend to many Impressionists. These letters had nothing to do with Manet, nor do they seem to have been owned by Leenhoff. However, Adolphe Tabarant had written extensively on Pissarro. Most likely, he obtained these letters in the course of his research, and they were, at some point, lumped in with the Manet materials. Similarly, Mina Curtiss originally purchased the archive in the course of working on a biography of Manet, a book project she never completed. But her notes, drafts of chapters, and correspondence were all housed with the collection.

Another issue I faced was the collection’s heavily mediated nature: almost every letter and document was accompanied by another series of documents that enclosed or explained it. There were wrappers with notes about letters, there were handwritten copies of letters, and many times there were both. When I opened a folder, it was often hard to know what I was looking at. I also didn’t know who had made these accompanying materials—multiple hands were present. In addition, some of these wrappers were made out of scrap papers, which posed conservation concerns.

The wrappers and transcriptions couldn’t be separated from the original items, obviously—they were an important part of the collection’s history—but it had to be made clear which was which. And appropriate steps, from a conservation perspective, needed to be taken to safeguard all materials.

And then there were other problems: folders with copies of letters or wrappers for letters, but no sign of the original material; items listed in the inventory that I could not find in the collection; items with unclear provenance; and a whole range of formats, all with different conservation needs, from Manet’s Legion of Honor diploma, a document on vellum that had, at some point, been folded into a small square, to the bill for his funeral expenses, an oversized piece of fragile nineteenth-century paper in the process of splitting in two.

In each case, I felt that my role was to intervene as little as possible, to keep the materials together, since it all reflected the history of the collection, but to make each part and item distinguishable, to describe them accurately, and to make sure they received appropriate conservation treatment and housing.

The first step was organization: though, in general, standard archival practice is to leave archives in the order in which they were placed by the organization or individual who created them (in archival theory, this is referred to as “original order”), in this case the original order had already been partly dismantled. I chose to reorganize the collection alphabetically by the last name of the creator of each document. Since the inventory that accompanied the collection on its acquisition has been preserved in a new subseries, Supplemental Material, the original order can still be understood and studied (and even digitally reconstructed).

Each letter and document then received a detailed catalog record, in which any accompanying materials were noted. Each item was also assigned a unique accession number, allowing it to be tracked as it is issued to researchers, photographed, or shown in exhibitions. Large groups of related letters or documents were split into multiple folders to minimize handling and to make it easier for researchers to access the exact documents they were interested in.

As I worked my way through the collection, I brought some items to the Morgan’s conservation staff for treatment: for instance, the Legion of Honor diploma was gently unfolded by Elizabeth Gralton, Sherman Fairchild Foundation Fellow in the Thaw Conservation Center.

Three stages in the treatment of the Legion of Honor diploma; MA 3950.3:227

At each stage I faced questions, and often they were the most basic of questions: what is this? Who wrote it or made it?

Over and over, I turned to experts, among them Isolde Pludermacher, curator at the Musée d'Orsay; Samuel Rodary, Manet scholar; Diana Greenwald, curator at Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum; and Daria Rose Foner and Kathryn Kremitzer, specialists in nineteenth-century painting at Sotheby’s. They patiently answered my queries, no matter how simple or complex. At the Morgan, I plagued Maria Oldal, head of cataloging, with innumerable requests for advice and guidance. I also made extensive use of a thesis, “The document as voice: the Manet archive of the Pierpont Morgan Library,” prepared by the scholar Melissa de Medeiros in 2002.

Even with everyone’s help, questions remain: I still have not identified who is behind the distinctive curly handwriting on the sketchbook and many of the wrappers.

Nor have I been able to figure out where the letters from Berthe Morisot and Manet’s cousin Jules de Jouy that are listed in the inventory but do not appear to have come to the Morgan in 1974 are currently located.

For every intractable question, however, there were extraordinary discoveries and rewards. For instance, one of the highlights of the collection is a letter from Victorine Meurent, the model for Olympia and numerous other paintings, to Suzanne Manet, written soon after Édouard’s death. This letter has long been known to scholarship and was in no sense hidden. Because of its importance, it had been cataloged and even digitized.

Letter from Victorine Meurent to Suzanne Manet, July 31, 1883; MA 3950.3:263

However, reference was made in the inventory to a long biographical essay on Meurent by Tabarant. I could not find this essay anywhere in the boxes and folders containing the collection—an experience that I discovered the art historian Eunice Lipton also had when she came to consult the Tabarant Collection in the 1980s. Her humorous (though, for a curator, fairly dismaying) portrayal of her visit to the Morgan appears in her book Alias Olympia¹: she was told by a Morgan librarian at the time that they didn’t know where the essay was and that she could look for it herself, a process that took two weeks and yielded nothing.

Luckily, Lipton was a tenacious researcher dedicated to her subject, and Alias Olympia concludes with her tracking down a copy of the essay that Liliane Yacoel happened to hold on to—and even meeting Yacoel herself. Lipton generously shared her copy of that copy with me, and, with her permission, it is now linked to the catalog record for the Meurent letter and thus available to researchers interested in Meurent.

To cap off the untangling of this affair, I was lucky enough to be able, in the fall of 2023, to view the painting Olympia at the Metropolitan Museum in the exhibition Manet/Degas—the first time that Olympia has ever come to the United States. Though not Meurent’s first visit: as new research by James Fairhead has revealed², Meurent herself actually came to New York in 1868 as one of a group of artistes brought over by a theatrical entrepreneur who was staging opéra bouffes at the French Theatre on Fifth Avenue. Meurent was presented and performed as a leading cancan dancer, and her appearances garnered local coverage, including a profile in Jersey City’s Evening Times.

Another moving aspect of the collection are the letters that attest to the financial precarity that many now-famous painters experienced. There are numerous letters, for instance, from Monet, asking Manet (who had family money) for loans. In these two letters, Monet describes being hounded by bailiffs, says that he and his seriously ill wife are about to be thrown out by their landlord and that no one will lend them money, and begs Manet not to abandon them.

Money is everywhere in these materials: from the movers’ receipt for carrying the paintings from Manet’s studio to the posthumous sale of his work at the Hôtel Drouot in February 1884 to the ledger containing accounts related to the parcels of land the Manet family owned and collected rents on.

In general, the collection contains much material that illuminates the braided subjects of family, money, and legacies, artistic and otherwise. The full processing of the collection has already facilitated loans of items to exhibitions that examine these connections, such as Manet: A Model Family, on view at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in the fall and winter of 2024–2025. It is my hope that the work that I and my colleagues have done over the past few years will make much new research into these and other subjects possible.

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Sal Robinson
Lucy Ricciardi Assistant Curator, Literary and Historical Manuscripts
The Morgan Library & Museum

Endnotes

1. Eunice Lipton, Alias Olympia: A Woman’s Search for Manet’s Notorious Model and Her Own Desire(New York: Scribner’s, 1992), pp. 133–135.
2. James Fairhead, “Victorine Meurent: new evidence from America and Paris,” The Burlington Magazine, 165, August 2023, pp. 817–827.