We hope you can join us for two exciting webinars this September as we usher in our Fall programming. This season we will present Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists Édouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, and Kees van Dongen, as well as larger topics on conservation and art collecting in South America. 


Manet & Morisot — with Emily Beeny
Tuesday, September 9, 2025 at 1:00 pm ET (10:00 am PT, 19:00 CET)
Registration link available here: https://wpi.art/2025/08/28/manet-morisot/


Join Emily Beeny, Chief Curator of the Legion of Honor and originating curator of the exhibition Manet & Morisot, for an exploration of the friendship and artistic exchange between Édouard Manet and Berthe Morisot. Unfolding over roughly fifteen years—between 1868 and 1883—theirs was the closest relationship between any two members of the Impressionist circle. Seen side by side, their paintings trace the evolution of a singular friendship by turns collaborative and competitive, playful and charged, lit by an enduring mutual sympathy and a shared desire to make art new.


Manet and Morisot were quite different painters and people, resulting in a fascinating dynamic in their personal and professional worlds. Where he was all charm and wit, open to the world in ways then possible only for a man of his elevated social class, Morisot was admired for her formidable reserve, her discrete elegance and intelligence: the corresponding virtues of a nineteenth-century bourgeois lady. The pleasures of Manet’s art lie in its indelible graphic power, its dialogue with the old masters, its joyous, outsized ambition. The pleasures of Morisot’s are subtler ones of light and surface, of images that seem to shimmer with the possibility of their own disappearance. Manet was essentially a studio painter, producing pictures he hoped would look dashed off “at the first go,” only through protracted revision. By contrast, Morisot was trained almost from the beginning as a plein-air landscape painter, capable of swift, decisive work under changing conditions of weather and light. Learn more about this celebrated artistic friendship and by extension, the history of modern art.


Emily A. Beeny is Chief Curator of the Legion of Honor and Barbara A. Wolfe Curator in Charge of European Paintings at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. A specialist in French paintings and drawings of the 17th-19th century, she received her PhD from Columbia University with a dissertation on Nicolas Poussin. Before coming to San Francisco, she served as Associate Curator of Drawings at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, where her exhibition projects included Manet and Modern Beauty (2019-20), LA SURPRISE: Watteau in Los Angeles, and (2021-2022), and Poussin and the Dance (2021-22). She has also held curatorial appointments at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Norton Simon Museum and currently serves on both the vetting committee for TEFAF Maastricht and the editorial board for the Boletín del Museo del Prado.  She is developing two exhibition projects at the moment: one devoted to the friendship between Édouard Manet and Berthe Morisot (opening this fall), and the other, to the French Baroque artist Simon Vouet (scheduled for 2026). In 2021, Emily was awarded the Prix du rayonnement de la langue et de la littérature françaises by the Académie française.


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Van Dongen’s Studios and the Avant-Garde — with Anita Hopmans
Tuesday, September 23, 2025 at 12:00 pm ET (18h CET)
Registration link available here: https://wpi.art/2025/05/15/van-dongens-studios-and-the-avant-garde/


The Dutch-French artist Kees van Dongen (1877-1968) moved from the Netherlands to Paris when he was twenty and quickly joined the modernist vanguard alongside Picasso and Matisse. At the height of his fame, he occupied a luxury, five-floor mansion in Paris where he had a vast studio space, at no. 5 rue Juliette-Lamber. The path of Van Dongen’s exceptional career is reflected in his succession of studios, from the hilltop of Montmartre to his space in the famous Bateau-Lavoir, from the large apartment-studio at 6 rue Saulnier (just around the corner from the Folies-Bergères music hall) to the newer accommodations proximate the Bois de Boulogne at 29 Villa Saïd. Some of his old studios are still intact. The disparate dimensions and surroundings, as well as the nature of the works we see in studio shots, illustrate Van Dongen’s early choices. By way of these spaces, lead scholar of the Kees van Dongen Catalogue Raisonné project Anita Hopmans will introduce us to the artist’s career within the Parisian Avant-garde.

Anita Hopmans was a Head of Collections & Research, in addition to other positions, at the RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History (2003-2023) and, prior to this, was a researcher at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. She is currently completing her PhD at the University of Amsterdam as an external PhD candidate on “Kees van Dongen and the Avant-Garde: About Chances, Choices & the Canon, 1895-1914/1920” and is a recent recipient of a research grant from the Netherlands Institute for Conservation, Art and Science for her material-technical research on a selection of Van Dongen paintings in Dutch museums and private collections. She is also the leading scholar of the Kees van Dongen Digital Catalogue Raisonné Project (Wildenstein Plattner Institute).

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