Berthe Weill (1865-1951) was a French art dealer credited with launching the careers of Picasso, Matisse, and Modigliani in Paris, as well as for spending significant time, money, and effort on promoting lesser-known female impressionists like Émilie Charmy and Suzanne Valadon. Her gallery was located in Pigalle and she was fond of fauvism, cubism, and every other movement flowing against the current of mainstream art in France and beyond.

My mother is a painter, like her father before her, and the French impressionists are what I was raised on. She’s a Chagall and Renoir girlie, I’m more of a Morisot and Monet-head. Impressionism is baked into my DNA and so god help me when I see a new exhibition being advertised, my ass is there.

FIRST REMARKS : The exhibition was crowded on a Tuesday morning. Near the entrance, classic Toulouse-Lautrec posters advertising le Divan Japonais and May Milton were carefully arranged, likely in the hopes of drawing people in. Nothing captures the feeling of an era so perfectly and inspires such envy as those messy, riotous advertisements of la Belle Époque. A good portion of the floor space was devoted to showcasing the works of female artists who once worked with Weill - but it is a bit funny that 3/4 names used for promo on the official poster are of men.

MATISSE : I looked close at the Matisse and for a moment I really did smell the turpentine used to dilute the pigments. And the rich goo of the paint. Have you ever rolled titanium white or cobalt blue between your fingers and took a breath of that sticky oil? I felt it bloom somewhere behind my nose, in my skull. The plums, greens, deep blues of the carpet on the young artist’s bedroom floor broke down as an illusion the closer I leaned in, the closer I interrogated the brush strokes for what they were. This close, they were like tiny gems. I fought every instinct urging me to run my fingers over the sharp cracks and valleys of the painting, to understand through touch exactly how Matisse pieced this thing together, how his brush and wrist moved, how the directions came straight from his mind. A memory of art class in 2006 cut through me like a palette knife. I was no Matisse, but I did feel like one once.

CHARMY : And then my heart leaped when I saw the pure purple-pink of the pomegranate. It seemed so obvious, then, that if any one of these old women in the gallery were to defy the security staff and lick the painting, they’d come away awed at the sweet sourness of the fruit. Émilie added turquoise in sloppy, childish spirals onto the core of the slice standing guard over its sisters and it made me love her, love her boldness and vision even though I found it ugly. And that brush of solid white under the fruits - don’t you just want to feel it?

MARVAL : In an art class once, we were asked to reproduce a sketch of a man by turning the reference photo upside down and forgetting that there was a human there at all. He became a tangle of lines, just lines. And lines, in theory, are easier to trace when you don’t have a voice in your head arguing that the nose is too big or the skull is misshapen. In bypassing the mind, in breaking the piece down into component parts, I drew the best rendition of a person I’d ever attempted.

All art is like this and if you shut off your brain, lean in close enough, you’ll see it too. Unfortunately, when paintings are right-side-up and not an upside-down sheet of printer paper, I am not very good at finding the components. But sometimes, if you stare at a thing long enough, your eyes unfocus and you can begin to work backwords, begin to identify the artist’s strategy.

Minerva bared her neck to me, then, a war goddess almost vulnerable. Almost submissive, like I caught her at a bad time but she didn’t have enough fight in her to tell me to leave her alone. The smooth column of her pale throat gave up all sorts of secrets as I stepped closer: baby pinks, foamy greens, soft blues, sick yellows - and I understood then that the goddess, like her flesh, like her submission, like her painting, was so many things.

PICASSO : These sly women looked like they’ve been caught by a camera mid-shake. Their rich gowns and white skin shiver with the sliding frame, smirking, caught in an uncertain panorama by a hesitant photographer. Are there men in the frame? Yes, but they’re faceless. Not worth mentioning.

Why is it only the girls who’ve noticed us? They all seem to have a sixth sense for the artist’s lens, like they’ve picked up on some psychic sublety that the men haven’t. So is this a celebration of women? Of isolating them in a crowd and calling attention to their sharp eyes and rosy cheeks? Picasso was nineteen and in Paris for the first time when he painted this. Who knows what he was thinking?

DERAIN, CZOBEL : For how we talk about fauvism - the vibrant little cousin of impressionism - you’d think it was some kind of revolution to see the world in shapes and colours. For example : did you know the world contains only neons and pastels? Can you see it like that? In even the dullest parts of the world? Every part of the landscape, the face, the body, is an autonomous set piece working in unison with every other part. Like great potato-stamps, depositing one shade at a time to bloom an image into being.

Take Derain’s landscape. Sure, it’s similar in its project to cubism, in breaking the image down into chunky, matte parts. But consider this: the colours are pretty (straight-up just my opinion) and the shapes are far more naturalistic. The descent into abstraction continues.

GLEIZES : Speaking of components, it turns out that the world is simple geometry, too. Anything can be reduced to cubes and lines the way it can be reduced to colour. However, the rigid restraint of cubism, to me, falls apart against the vibrant simplicity of fauvism. It’s missing something. It is duller. With every level of abstraction you embrace, you must also lose some other fundamental truth about your perception of the world. It seems to me, then, that impressionism is really just a race to the bottom of how abstract the world can be.

But that’s the point, right - impressionism, just impressions. Just feelings about the world translated into art. No right or wrong. (But that doesn’t mean I’ll ever enjoy cubism.)

CONCLUSION : The bells of Notre-Dame are gone-but-not-gone. The great rosette window is a memory, real-but-not-real. Everything is a suggestion of something else.