ArtMuse ArtTalks: Host Grace Anna Interviews NYT Best Selling Author B.A. Shapiro

In between seasons we are launching "ArtMuse ArtTalks", in which we share interviews and discussions on subjects relevant to ArtMuse.

In this special episode, host Grace Anna interviews author B.A. Shapiro about her upcoming historical fiction novel on the artist's model, and painter in her own right, Berthe Morisot. Throughout the course of the interview, Grace Anna asks B.A. Shapiro about the importance of sharing Berthe Morisot's immense life story, the unjust erasure of female artists like Berthe Morisot from art history, and how we can begin to give Berthe Morisot, and female artists alike, the recognition they deserve.

Listen to this special bonus episode of ArtMuse:

This episode is produced by Kula Production Company.

Berthe Morisot was a female Impressionist painter active in Paris during the second half of the 19th century. She exhibited her work alongside famed Impressionist artists Monet, Degas, and Renoir, among others, and was the only woman to be included in the first major show of Impressionist art in 1874. Despite the many limitations she faced as a female artist of her time, Morisot established herself as an integral member of the Impressionist group. She also modeled for a number of paintings by Manet, and though she was married to his brother, many believe that Morisot and Manet engaged in a long-run secret affair.

B.A. Shapiro is a New York Times best selling author. In 2013, she was awarded the New England Book Award for Fiction for her novel, The Art Forger. Over her impressive career as an author, she has written both novels and screenplays, as well as a non-fiction self help book.

B.A. Shapiro's The Lost Masterpiece can be preordered on Amazon HERE.

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

Grace Anna:  Hi, listeners, host Grace Anna here. Today I'm joined by New York Times bestselling author B.A. Shapiro to discuss her latest novel, The Lost Masterpiece, based on the life story of the impressionist painter and artist’s model, Berthe Morisot. Barbara, thank you so much for joining me today. I'm so excited to deep dive into the lost masterpiece, Berthe Morisot's life at large, and the importance of sharing Berthe's story with the world.

So to begin, I've had the pleasure of reading The Lost Masterpiece. But for our listeners today, can you give us a brief introduction to your upcoming novel and tell us what it's about? 

B.A. Shapiro: The Lost Masterpiece is about Berthe Morisot as an unsung woman, as both an artist and as an artist’s model. The original title of the book was “Six Lunatics, One of Which is a Woman”, and this was from one of the earliest critiques of the Impressionists. And the other five were Monet, Renoir, Degas, Pissarro, and Sisley. And so, also it's about the struggle of all of these Impressionists to, you know, become a school because they were derided. And it goes back and forth in time to the present, where in the present, Tamara Ruben, inherits a painting by Édouard Manet that had been stolen by the Nazis, and she had no idea that she even had any relatives who were involved with the Nazis and she gets the painting and falls in love with it, and it starts acting a little strangely. And then we go back to Berthe's story and we see her struggling and her life, and her life with her sister and her relationship with all of the Impressionists, including Édouard Manet, who was in love with her and she was in love with him, but he was married. She ultimately ended up marrying his brother so that they could be near each other, and there may have been a couple of other things that were going on between them. So it's about unsung women, both in the present and the past.

Grace Anna: Beautiful. And you do such a great job intertwining the present and past and all of the generations of Berthe’s female family members and the Impressionists’ plight, like you said, which is super interesting, and we can definitely dive into. Before we dive into Berthe's life and the novel, I do have a preliminary question, which is, were you inspired by Woman in Gold Klimt’s portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, and the story behind that with getting the painting back from Vienna, and of course the history of the Nazis stealing that painting from that family?

B.A. Shapiro: Actually, I never read that book, but I heard it's really good. The whole getting the painting back from the Nazis was a secondary plot that got added in later. I was mostly interested in writing a novel about Berthe and how she was, just this impressionist… She worked with those impressionists, they worked in the same studio. They thought she was just as good as they were, and then before she died, finally the Impressionists had made it. After they died, everybody remembers the men, but very few people remember Berthe. So that was my drive to do it and in the need to come up with a story that was greater than just that, then I later added the whole Nazi piece, which is also fun, and there are so many paintings that they stole and so much else that haven't been recovered.

Grace Anna: Absolutely. And as a side note on that, I've noticed going to museums in the past few years that the plaques will actually say that this painting was stolen by the Nazis and has been returned, or it includes that history, so it is important. 

Grace Anna: So your bookend asks, and I'm gonna quote it here, “Who was Berthe Morsot? What wounds, riddles and resentments plagued her, and to what lengths will the spirit of Berthe go in order to enact her revenge?”. So I would love to ask you to answer some of those questions today and tell us, who was Berthe Morisot?

B.A. Shapiro: Well, first of all, she was a very, very beautiful, very, very talented young woman. At a time when women were just not allowed to do much. She was also from the upper-classes and they were even more restrictive to women than, you know, a lower class person might have been. And she just chafed under all of this. So she was very close to her sister Edma. And Edma was a more easy going kind of person and they were both artists and Edma got married and gave up her art, and Berthe stayed single for a long time and refused to give up her art, although she had many troubles in and out being a woman, her parents didn't like it and society didn't like it. And one of the most interesting things that I learned writing this is that, so a woman of her class at that time could not paint any man that they were not related to. They could not paint any public scenes. So Degas is going out and he's doing his ballet dancers and horse racers and Renoir is painting all these people in groups, and she couldn't do any of that. It was just not allowed. And she persisted. And persisted. And so in my book, The Lost Masterpiece. I have had her kind of win. 

Grace Anna: Yeah, absolutely. I think your book does a really good job at diving into the plight of women and all the challenges they faced, not just in an artistic sense, but in a societal sense.

Grace Anna: And I actually have one quote from Berthe’s own notebooks that have survived in which she writes, I think towards the end of her life, “I don't think there has ever been a man who treated a woman as an equal, and that's all I would've asked for, for I know I'm worth as much as they”. And I think your book does bring justice to her. That is really the heart of it. She was such a talent, but she was held back by the societal restrictions on women and really fought in her own ways against them. And I'd love for you to speak more about the limitations that female artists, especially of the upper-class could paint. 

Grace Anna: I loved this quote from your book and in this scene, this is not giving any major plot points away, I believe she's watching either Manet or Degas paint a scene of a party, and in the book it says, “Berthe was envious of his freedom to paint such a carefree and spontaneous scene. It isn't proper for a woman of her class to paint a man she's not related to or anyone outside her social circle, and therefore painting the boisterous joy of a party that includes men and possibly women of a lesser repute is beyond her cloistered reach”. And I, I think the term cloistered reach is so beautifully put. Can you speak a little more to the struggles that Berthe and other women of her time? I mean, of course there was Mary Cassat, who was also a painter, an American painter, but a female impressionist painter, and how that inspired your story?

B.A. Shapiro: Well, the Mary Cassat thing is interesting because Berthe was involved right at the beginning with all of the Impressionists, and they held many shows that were just derided by everyone. Cassat came in quite a bit later and she was American, so the restrictions on American women were definitely there in the late 19th century, but they weren't as rigid. And so she stepped in. Berthe was a little annoyed because she had always been the female Impressionist. Oh, she shows up and now, you know. But, I mean it’s so hard for us to envision how people just, I mean, women just, this is it. I mean, there was very little idea about rebelling. It just wasn't done. And so she tried within the confines of what she could do because she didn't wanna, I mean, it would bring dishonor to her family if she painted a man that she didn't know. I mean, how ridiculous is that? 

Grace Anna: I know. It's hard to believe. 

B.A. Shapiro: Yeah, and then she was very close to her family of origin, and then she married and had a child, and when she had a child, it was like, well “how can I do this when it's going to, you know, it could possibly destroy her little girl?”. And so there were these chains that were just there. And she pushed and pushed and pushed, but then I pushed a little bit more. 

Grace Anna: Can you speak to the challenges of being an artist’s model?

Because of course, Berthe sat for many of Manet’s paintings. Because of course we discuss many stories of women, female models who suffered greatly with the repercussions of that, but can you speak to the challenges of being an artist’s model, especially an artist model of the upper-class, and what you uncovered about Berthe’'s experience with that as well?

B.A. Shapiro: Well, basically at that time most people considered artist’s models to either be prostitutes and most often mistresses of the artists. So she could not, as a single woman of her circle, could not be a model, but somehow between…So Manet was an extremely handsome, charismatic, brilliant man, and he was the kind of guy walked into a room and the whole room perked up and she had kind of fallen for him even though he was married. And he approached her in a kind of sexy way and said that this is what he wanted to do as a painter. The first painting was The Balcony, which is one of the most famous. And she said, “I can't do that”. And then his mother, who is friends with her mother, as she says many times in the book, Manet is a man who gets what he wants. And so she did model for him. Obviously, she was always clothed, which some of his models were not. It was also particularly risky because he had just painted two very famous paintings that were really derided. There was one in the grass, what's it called?

Grace Anna: Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe.

B.A. Shapiro: Yes. Thank you. And so it was a painting, a very classical style of two men and two women sitting in…having a picnic in a park. And the men were very finely dressed and the women were nude. And then he did another one of a prostitute. And so he was like, renegade, you know, you don't do this. And so it was even worse for her to be painted by him, but he convinced her and she did it. And he also was not very nice to his models. She basically took him in hand and just said, “no, you can't treat me like that”. But it was quite grueling. That’s the other thing that's really interesting is how differently, like these Impressionist painters, we think they're all the same, how differently they painted. So Berthe would do tons of sketches and she would start with charcoal and then maybe go to watercolors and then maybe go to oil and he would just throw the paint. And so he made lots of mistakes. And you know, you're sitting for a really long time, rigidly holding a position. And so it wasn't easy. 

B.A. Shapiro: And then the paintings went to the salon, the Paris Salon, was the only place where accepted art could be. So his paintings, not the outrageous ones, were in the salon and people walked up and said, “oh, who is that woman? Maybe she's his mistress? What's going on here?”. So that also brought shame to her family. But her mother did allow her. Also, she and her sister would go to the Louvre to paint. So this was something mostly men did, but they were allowed to go and their mother came with them to a public museum and sat with them because they could not be by themselves in a public place. 

Grace Anna: Wow. 

B.A. Shapiro: So they were in love, but it was a hidden love. But some of his paintings of her were so astute. It is telling that another artist looked at one of them and said, “he is making love to her with his brush”, you know? And so every time he finished a painting, even though she loved sitting for him, there was the risk that people were going to see that, and he had a very unhappy marriage to someone who was nowhere his equal. And there’s a lot of interesting backstory there. So they fell in love and her letters to her sister seemed to implicate that they had an affair. And some historians believe they did. Some historians believe they didn't. I, in The Lost Masterpiece, decided that they did because it's just too good of a plot point. 

Grace Anna: Yeah, fair enough. 

B.A. Shapiro: And then she went on… he actually did eleven paintings of her. She also modeled for Renoir with her daughter, like a year before she died and she was like a much older looking woman, although it turned out she was only fifty four. And other than that, she was not a model, but she was the model for eleven of his paintings. I'm pretty sure he painted her more than any other one of his models. 

Grace Anna: Mm-hmm. Yeah, we actually have an episode on Victorine and Laure of Olympia, so we deep dived into Victorine's life and Laure's life, or what we know of Laure's life, which is very fascinating. But it's interesting to compare Victorine with Berthe because first of all, their depictions are so wildly different. Victorine is seen in the nude very, very openly in the nude, as you described, of Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe and Olympia. But it's interesting to your point of how Manet painted Berthe. It is almost as if her portraits, though she's clothed and from first glance they’re more traditional…they're almost a bit more seductive than his portraits of Victorine. So that's very interesting. I also think it's interesting that both Victorine and Berthe were painters themselves in their own right. 

Grace Anna: I was actually, as I was reading your novel, thinking, did these two women know each other? What would they have thought of each other? Of course, also, a big difference is Victorine was a woman of the streets, and Berthe was from the upper-class. So in terms of their social status, they were from completely different worlds. But it is interesting to compare their experience as models because Victorine, of course in Olympia and Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe caused huge uproars, but she didn't have that social reputation at risk. Whereas, Berthe did. So it's very interesting to compare their stories. For anyone listening who hasn't listened to our episode on Victorine and Laure, it's a great accompanying episode because it's another perspective into some of Manet’s models. But yeah, it's very interesting. 

B.A. Shapiro: The other thing about Berthe when she modeled, except a few rare times, is her mother was there. So even though sometimes they were in a studio with the other painters and people were walking in and out, again her mother sat there and chaperoned her. Now, this is a woman who's like twenty eight years old, you know? And her mother has to chaperone her wherever she goes anywhere. So I assume Victorine’s mother did not. 

Grace Anna: No. I think that's a safe assumption. Do you have any favorite paintings of Berthe and favorite paintings by Berthe? 

B.A. Shapiro: Well, I do love The Balcony, Manet’s painting. So there are four figures in the painting and Berthe is sitting in front and she's looking out over the balcony. And she's beautiful, and you can see her personality in her face. Behind her is a woman who actually was a very well known musician at the time, and she looks like she doesn't have anything behind her face. And then there's another painter who's standing behind Berthe, who just also looks very stiff. And then there's a small boy in the back who happens to be Manet’s wife's…whatever…another side story there. And she, although there's four of them there in a rather classical pose, she stands out and she's very mysterious and serious, yet not quite serious. And she's just so powerful in that painting.

B.A. Shapiro: Another one of my favorites is…sometimes they call it…a lot of these paintings have many different names, so it can be really hard to follow this, but there's a painting that's sometimes called Repose and sometimes called Berthe Morisot Reclining. And she's sitting back in her chair and she's got her leg kicked out and it's very informal at a time when paintings, even ones of nudes, were very formal and you can see her personality and you can see that this is not quite a normal relationship between an artist and his model, and it wasn't, so I love that one. And then the portrait of her in the black hat. She is standing tall and she's got the ribbons of her hat coming down. And actually all of those, and a few more of Manet’s paintings of her are in-scene in the book. They're described as they're being painted, and the backstory of how it came to be and what happened to her before and after. It was really just mind blowing what he could do, uh, how he, again, you know, he was making love to her with his brush. 

Grace Anna: Absolutely. You could really feel that. We had, here in New York, the “Manet Degas” show last year, and many of those portraits were in the show and I, one was struck by her beauty. I thought, wow. And I was struck by how much of her spirit you could feel through these portraits… her intensity. You could tell that she had a fierce spirit. 

B.A. Shapiro: Oh, yeah. 

Grace Anna: And actually, I think my favorite from that show, and it's a funky portrait, but there was a portrait in the show…it was the very end of the show, and I believe it was the last portrait he ever painted of Berthe. And it was Berthe in mourning after her father had passed away. And it's a very haunting image, but you just feel so much from her. And it's not the most flattering, but it is so, so, so powerful. I really think that was my favorite image from the whole show. I just walked away like- wow. Very intense.

B.A. Shapiro: She was very saddened by her father's death. And in that particular painting, he not only gets at her sadness, which is why it's not the most flattering of her, like she wasn't flirting with him,  but he, again, you could feel his empathy for her sadness. And that added not just a touch of what their relationship was, but it added the universal grief that we all experience and when that universality…so he used her really well in portraying grief as well as sympathy. 

Grace Anna: Yeah, absolutely. I also found it very interesting…I looked up some of her paintings and I found a self portrait, and I found it very interesting how differently she portrayed herself from Manet. If you can speak to that. I'll let you dive into that. 

B.A. Shapiro: Yeah. It's, it's, it's not particularly flattering. 

Grace Anna: Which I think is so interesting! That it's not particularly flattering. 

B.A. Shapiro: Well, you know, you think about it as women, we never think, or I think most women think, “oh, my nose is wrong, my chin is wrong, this isn't good, that isn’t good, she looks so much better than I do”. So I think that was part of it. But also she too was getting at the feelings. She was very very good at creating emotion in her own painting, and I think that's how she saw herself. She also was not particularly happy at that point in her life. She had hoped that Manet was going to divorce his wife and marry her, and he never did. And she really believed that that was going to happen. And so, I think that's part of the sadness that you can see in this. 

Grace Anna: Yeah, absolutely. You can feel that. And what I think is also so interesting is how masculine she is. You know, in these images that Manet paints of her, she's in dresses, well, she's always in black, so she's not maybe the daintiest of women even in those, but she is very masculine here. She paints herself almost in masculine attire. She has a strong dignified look. She shows the grays of her hair. It feels very realistic and unafraid to really just show her raw self, which is very brave. And in the book, Berthe thinks about, looking at these portraits of her that Manet had painted at the salon. She does remark that she feels that he has made her maybe more beautiful than she herself feels she is. If anyone hasn't seen her self portrait yet, definitely look it up because it's so interesting to compare the two and I think your novel really gets at that difference in how she sees herself and how these artists see her and paint her. 

Grace Anna: Do you have any favorite paintings painted by Berthe?

B.A. Shapiro: Oh, I have many. She actually…she painted. 423 paintings. And you think that, I mean, she's more well known now than she was even 30 years ago, but still most people don't know her. When I was reading for one of my other books, I was doing research for the Art Forger, which is about Belle Gardner and the Gardner Museum, but also it's about Degas, and that was when I first found out about her. And I thought, I knew, you know, a bit about art. It was like, well, where did she come from? And here she was creating these brilliant paintings and then she disappeared. 

B.A. Shapiro: So one of my favorites is actually almost everybody's favorite, which is called The Cradle. And it is a painting of her sister Edma looking into the crib with a very very tiny baby in it, and there's veiling over the cradle and there's light coming in from the side of the cradle and the light comes through, lights the mother's face, and goes through the veiling and you can see the baby. The mother is just, you know, I mean, it's, it, this too is universal. It's every mother and every baby imbued with such incredible light and again, empathy for these subjects. So I really love that one. That's also in-scene in the book. 

B.A. Shapiro: And there is the, one of the two sisters, which she painted from memory and sketches that she had. So she had two sisters. There were three of them, and the other two were married and gone, and she was incredibly lonely. Her father worked all the time, he was a big important guy, and her mother was very meddling. She was just yearning for her sisters and to have them there. And so she compiles this painting of the two of them. They're younger than they were at the time she painted them, but that's how she remembers them, when they were all together and running around and climbing trees and you know, getting their mother mad at them. And that too has this universality of sisters, you know, of siblings of sitting quietly while also showing that both of them are quite traditional, that they followed the lines they were supposed to follow and Berthe didn't. 

B.A. Shapiro: She did another one, which I really like, which is called The Mother and Sister of the Artist. And this also looks like a very nice, traditional painting..you know, the mother is reading and Edma is, is sitting there and it's all very nice, but it also has a deceptive part to it because Edma is pregnant and you are not allowed to paint pregnant people. And you definitely, as a woman, are not allowed to do it. But they didn't care. You cannot tell she's pregnant, but everybody knew and uh, and she did it anyway.

B.A. Shapiro: Another one that I really like is called The Wet Nurse. So she got pregnant late and never really expected to get pregnant, and then did, and then she fell madly in love with her baby, like totally madly in love. So one day she walked into the garden and there was the wet nurse nursing the baby and she saw the light and she just said, “stay where you are!”. And she painted it. But this too is an inappropriate painting. And her husband, who is Édouard’s brother, which is another whole story, was aghast. Absolutely aghast. And he didn't want her to show it, but she did anyway. So she was such a brilliant painter. 

B.A. Shapiro: There's also a woman at her toilet, and it's a woman and she's just brushing her hair, you know, a lot of the impressionists did that. But there's a mirror there and you see the reflection here, and then the reflection there and how the light bounces from one to the other. I mean, it's just stunning. And you know, she was forgotten. 

Grace Anna: Wow. Yeah. Thank you. Your descriptions too, really speak to how much you learn about Berthe herself in looking at these paintings and even if they're not of her, you know, she's watching her sister with her baby and her sister had to give up her own career as an artist. And there is a complicated feeling in the painting. You know, you see this love between mother and child, but you also feel a sadness. And painting the sisters as they were when they all lived together. It just says so much about her own processing and her own processing of when she eventually has her own daughter and, and she herself becomes a mother, and I love the small rebellions that she snuck in there. 

B.A. Shapiro: Like you don't really know, you know, but she, she's doing it. 

Grace Anna: Yeah, absolutely. And to your point about the erasure of these female artists, and we see it all the time with the female artist’s models who contribute so much to these famous works of art and lived these amazing lives, and yet their names and their stories have been erased or largely erased from history. And there was a beautiful quote in your novel, Berthe’s daughter, Aimee, writes in her journal: “the very men who sought Maman’s advice and worked with her for so many years are exalted while she is diminished. Dare I say, forgotten”. And I just thought that was such a powerful way to put it. It really gets to the crux of your novel to our project here at ArtMuse. And it's- how do we now give these women a voice? And that's what you did. How do we bring justice to these women who have been wrongfully overlooked and written out of history? So if you could speak a little more to that. 

B.A. Shapiro: Well, that was the drive for this book, because I have written…this is my fifth book about art, you know, so I think I know quite a bit, and I didn't know that much about Berthe. And then I would talk to people who also know about art and they would say “who is she?” You know, very intelligent, highly educated people. And I thought, I gotta make this woman more known. I'm not the first, in the nineties, the whole women's movement started trying to get female artists better known, but still there's no comparison everybody knows Manet, Degas, Renoir. So I really wanted to do that. 

B.A. Shapiro: And then I also have a present day story of a woman who is struggling with work. She is very successful and she has a much different trajectory and she does discover that she's Berthe’s great-great-great-great granddaughter. But she still is having trouble as a woman, and she's still struggling, and so I also wanted to compare and contrast that. And so I came of age in the seventies and we were the ones who were really pushing, you know, it's like all, it's never gonna get married, never change my name. Well, I didn't change my name, but I did get married. But I wasn't gonna have kids. It was just gonna be all career, career, career. And then I ran the Boston office of a software development company that primarily wrote software for the FAA. So everybody I was dealing with were mostly ex pilots and Navy and Air Force men and I started realizing how difficult it is to break through their assumptions about what I could do. So that further drove me. And so all of my books have strong women fighting for something and trying to become who they can become and what the problems are against that. 

Grace Anna: Yeah. It really makes us think how far have we come and that women are still facing so many challenges in today's world. And you know, I wanna thank you for putting Berthe’s story out there. I agree. I've studied art history for 15 years. I got my masters at the Institute of Fine Arts here in New York, and women are largely overlooked. I was inspired to do this podcast by one of Caravaggio's models. I studied Caravaggio, I wrote my master's thesis on him. I focused on him for years and years and years. I looked at these paintings that this woman is in, and I never learned her name. I never learned her story. One day I came across her name, Fillide Melandroni, and I came across her story. She was this courtesan in Rome and she lived this interesting life, and I thought- Why don't we know this? Why are these stories written out? You know, her story is just as important to know and then how will that change the way we look at these paintings? So the next time we see a painting of Manet’s of Berthe, can we think of Berthe and what she went through and her life and see it through their eyes? And of course then look up and go see her own art and appreciate her own art. But you know, what you did is important and it's really important to get these stories out there. And I think you did it in such a brilliant way where as you said, you bring the past and present together and it does force the question- How far have we come? And what can we learn from these stories of the past?

B.A. Shapiro: So you'll be very interested to know that I'm working on a book about Missia Sert. Do you know Missia? 

Grace Anna: No, I don't. 

B.A. Shapiro: Wow. You're gonna love this. She was a muse. Actually the working title is called The Muse. She was a muse to Toulouse-Lautrec. She was a model to Toulouse-Lautrec. But she did more than just be a model. She actually was a muse and a patron to Toulouse-Lautrec, to Renoir, and to three or four other very, very well known artists as well as musicians and writers. She was a muse to Proust. She sat on Liszt’s lap when she was six years old and played Beethoven, and she was this really big deal in society in Paris during the Belle Époque. So she's a really cool unsung woman who had a tremendous influence and also had a very interesting, kind of destructive life. So I'll let you know when that gets published. 

Grace Anna: Oh my goodness. Please, yes, we'd love to have you back here on the show and and discuss that. That's amazing. 

B.A. Shapito: Check her out.

Grace Anna: Definitely. 

B.A. Shapiro: She was married three times. Her first husband sold her to the second husband. You can't make this stuff up. 

Grace Anna: And she was also in the second half of the 19th century? That sort of Impressionist world? 

B.A. Shapiro: Yes, she's fascinating. 

Grace Anna: Fascinating too, to inspire not only visual art, but music. 

B.A. Shapiro: Yeah, you know, she was a muse!

Gracie Anna: I have now a running list of, of maybe over three hundred women who…I focus on visual art, but it's amazing how many of these stories, and once you start looking into them. You're like, my goodness, I never imagined their life could be this. And that she could also inspire musicians. That’s unbelievable. 

B.A. Shapiro: You're, you're gonna love her. 

Grace Anna: That is so exciting. We'll definitely have to partner in some way, and that sounds like a wonderful story and yet again, another important story to bring out into the world.

Grace Anna: I would love to ask you about what it was like to get into Berthe's headspace, you know, how do you get into her perspective? How much research goes into that? How do you decide what liberties to take? You know, our episodes are not from the women's perspective. We tell their life stories and we pose questions like: How did Berthe feel when X, Y, and Z happened? Allowing I guess, the listeners to think about and wonder and try to get into their perspective, but I'd love to just hear what that process was like.

B.A. Shapiro: Well, it was a very long process as it usually takes me three to four years to write one of these novels, this historical type of novel. Fortunately, there is quite a lot of information on Berthe. As much as you would find on Manet or Degas, but there was a lot more than there is on Misia. On Misia there's hardly any information. So I read her letters, her daughter's diary, historical novels, and correspondence from her family. Anyway, and this is only a fraction of them. I went to museums. I looked at her work and started to develop an image in my head of her. And I have reams of notes, you know, about everything I could find out. I have notes on her relationship with Manet that's real. And then I have notes on what I'm making up and changing. And I also use a lot of charts and multicolored file cards to get, because there are multiple stories in this book. So there are four different people's voices at four different times in history, and so to make that work. 

B.A. Shapiro: So there was a lot of research and a lot of writing. I usually start with the plot as my first draft and I discover the characters as I'm putting them in situations and deciding how they're gonna react. It’s kind of like, when you first meet somebody, you like 'em, but you don't know that much about them. And then you go out for lunch and you talk, and then you have dinner with your partners and then over a year or so, you start to really know who this person is. And so it feels similar, except I'm making it up.

B.A. Shapiro: I'd say every page of this book has been rewritten at least 20 times. Six, seven, eight full drafts. And each one is a deeper iteration of the characters, their interactions, and the plot. And then there are all these other things, like the words and the environmental cues, and, you know, there's just a lot of different moving pieces, but I mean, obviously Berthe was a real person, but she is also a real person to me, as I have described her, even though a lot of the things in the book didn't happen. I have an author's note at the end that says “this isn't true, that isn't true. This is historical fiction”.

Grace Anna: Yeah, I thought the author's note was very well done and important, you know, because it is historical fiction and, you know, there are liberties taken for the sake of the story and it is based on a real person and finding that line. And as someone who also does a lot of research and tries to get into these women's worlds, they are real people to you, the person and your character. But I find I really fall in love with them. It almost feels like dating because you know, for different episodes, I spend time with different women. But when you really deep dive into one of their lives, you just, they are real and you develop real feelings towards them. 

B.A. Shapiro: Yeah, and Tamara, the character who's in the present day, she's just as real a person to me. And I just made her up. That's why I love, .I'm actually by training an academic, but that's why I love writing historical fiction. And so you have an academic background, so you know, when you write anything for academia, you have to go to every last source who has ever breathed on your subject. But when you write fiction, you just do as much research as you want, and then you just take it from there with your imagination. It's so much easier.

Grace Anna: Absolutely. I found that with a podcast too. The episodes are well researched and I try to be as factual as possible, but it is a podcast. It's not a published paper, and I don't have to have the restraints of academia as well, and it is liberating. I’m trying to tell the stories in a creative way that really encourages listeners and or readers to themselves get into the mindset of these characters and, and these women.

Grace Anna: Is there anything else you wanna add about Berthe's life and about the importance of having her story be out in the world? 

B.A. Shapiro: Well, even though she was living in this magical time and when she was friends and part of this incredible movement of Impressionism and creating a whole new school of art, her life wasn't great. She actually had a tendency towards depression. She could be quite sickly, and she was madly in love with a married man. And we like to think of celebrated people, not that she's as celebrated as she should be, as you see what they are on the outside, but inside. And it wasn't an easy time to be a woman. So I wanted to humanize the moment and her moment. And the thing I love about historical fiction is that it's an opportunity for people who aren't interested in reading history or don't know that much about art to get them into a story that they like. And then what people tell me after they read my books, which I love, is that “I learned so much”. So that to me is the best thing somebody could say. 

Grace Anna: Yeah, it makes it approachable and it humanizes it, you know, art can feel intimidating for a lot of people and it's bringing the human back to art history and the stories, and that's where, you know, there are endless ways to look at a painting and to bring this perspective in is so important. So yeah, absolutely, it makes it more approachable and you do learn a lot. I mean, largely a lot of Berthe’s story in your novel is true. And the crux of it is her struggle…I mean most importantly… that struggle as a woman of her time and as a female artist of her time is the heart of your story and that is real. That was really her reality. 

B.A. Shapiro: Yeah, it was. 

Grace Anna: Well, I wanna thank you not just for being on the show, but for writing your story and being a part of getting Berthe’s name out. Do you know where listeners can see some of Berthe's paintings? Are there museums that kind of specialize or is she more scattered about?

B.A. Shapiro: There aren't museums that specialize in her. As a matter of fact, I went to a number of museums and they would have fifty or sixty paintings by Manet or Degas, and they might have two or three by Berte. But the Musee D'orsay, so there are quite a few of her paintings there. The Tate in London, the National Gallery in D.C., the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, which I actually wrote a book about. That one's mostly about Matisse. They have more than a lot of other places. The Met has a few. The Art Institute in Chicago has a number, and the MFA in Boston has a couple. And a lot of times they will have her paintings, but they won't be on display. 

Grace Anna: Has she ever had a retrospective show? 

B.A. Shapiro: There just was one recently in DC that I didn't get to go to. But I’m not sure it was her alone. But in my book she does! 

Grace Anna: Yeah, exactly. That is a happy ending in the book.

B.A. Here’s the book. The book will be out on June 17th. 

Grace Anna: We are putting a link to pre-order the book in the show notes of this episode. And I can say, personally, I read the book, I've thoroughly enjoyed the book and I know that our listeners at ArtMuse will love The Lost Masterpiece. So I personally cannot recommend it enough and I thank you so much for coming on here today to discuss The Lost Masterpiece and Berthe and the importance of sharing these women's stories. So thank you so much. 

B.A. Shapiro: Thank you. 

Grace Anna: And again, thank you for all you do in advocating for these women. 

B.A. Shapiro: Great, thanks!