Under the female gaze of Brisbane's Modern Woman exhibition

THERE is something missing from the Modern Woman exhibition, which appears to be a poorer cousin of a similarly named Canadian offering.

Louise Breslau artwork

THE expression la belle epoque was coined retrospectively to describe the decades of peace and affluence that preceded the Great War, and which were particularly associated with the glamour of Paris, "the capital of the 19th century", in the famous characterisation of Walter Benjamin (1935).

The great city, rebuilt by Haussmann under the Second Empire, attracted not only writers and artists from Britain and continental Europe - one thinks of Rainer Maria Rilke or Oscar Wilde, who died there in 1900 - but even a significant number of Australians, from George Lambert to Agnes Goodsir.

This is the Paris that has been fixed ever since in popular culture, as though the city had never been more quintessentially herself than in that time. Even the period between the two wars, recently celebrated in a Woody Allen film, is something of a sequel to the earlier generation, albeit one shadowed by the imminence of another global war. Gershwin's An American in Paris (1928), and the 1951 film with Gene Kelly, still imagine Paris as a place where artistic inspiration flows and free spirits can escape the trammels of Anglo-Saxon moralism.

But not everything was beautiful about fin-de-siecle Paris. The city had suffered more political convulsions than any other in Europe since the revolution of 1789: the riots of 1830 finally ended the restored Bourbon dynasty and replaced them with the Orleans monarchy, in turn overthrown in the revolution of 1848. After the brief Second Republic, Napoleon's nephew made himself emperor in a plebiscite (1852). He helped the Italians achieve unification in 1860, but was defeated 10 years later by the Prussians in their unification of the German states.

With the surrender of the French army and the abdication of the emperor, a revolutionary government known as the commune was set up in Paris. Naturally the newly proclaimed republican government, supported by the army, could not tolerate such anarchy in their capital, and by far the most violent period in the history of Paris since the revolution was the semaine sanglante - the bloody week in May 1871 - during which the army retook the city, quarter by quarter, summarily executing all who resisted. As an act of atonement for the sins of the commune, the Sacre-Coeur church was built on the hill at Montmartre (1875-1914), then still almost a village on the outskirts of Paris, with vineyards on its slopes.

Under the Third Republic, as the new government was called, France grew still more prosperous, although the nation remained haunted by humiliation at the hands of the Prussians. Eagerness to prove that outcome an anomaly led many in the French army to welcome renewed conflict with Germany in 1914. The government was weak and further undermined by such crises as the Panama Canal scandal (1892-93), which cost many middle-class people their savings and helped fuel the rise of an anti-semitism that erupted in extreme form with the Dreyfus affair (1894-1906).

Such is broadly the background to the exhibition of drawings that comes to the Queensland Art Gallery from the Musee d'Orsay in Paris. It comprises some fine drawings, and I have always been a little reluctant to complain about the standard of exhibitions coming to this country, knowing how very difficult it is to persuade important lenders that the southern hemisphere is a safe place to send their precious works.

In this case, however, there is a certain something missing. The exhibition feels altogether rather flat, and even less impressive if one thinks back to the 19th-century drawings from Louis-Antoine Prat's private collection, shown at the Art Gallery of NSW in 2010, and of which almost every one was a delight.

The rather middling quality of much of this show is the less forgivable because it seems to be basically a modified version of The Modern Woman exhibition held at the Museum of Vancouver in 2010. I haven't seen the catalogue of the Vancouver show, but even a cursory search on the net, which readers may care to repeat for themselves, reveals that it included some outstanding drawings that are sadly lacking here: additional and superior works by Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Manet, Forain, Vuillard, Pissarro, and Redon and Seurat, both omitted altogether here.

Evidently, it was felt that these pieces could safely be lent to Vancouver, but not to Brisbane. And as the number of works in each show seems to be about the same, they have clearly been replaced with inferior drawings. This has no doubt aggravated the other problem one feels with the exhibition, and that is the lack of curatorial focus. Time and again we come upon a wall label announcing some theme, only to find hardly any of the drawings that follow are discernibly related. Often works that should have belonged in this place are displayed somewhere else in the gallery; in fact even the order in the catalogue makes more sense than the hanging.

The catalogue contains nothing but reproductions of the images and a rather discursive and not very useful essay by the French curator, probably made more disconnected by the need to rewrite the text to suit the new version of the exhibition - part of the argument now being that a lot of minor and academic artists are worthy of reconsideration. Even the title, Daughters and Lovers, is oddly inept and has no clear relevance to the content of the show. One could add that French has no specific word for daughter: fille is much more ambiguous and variable in its connotations.

Speaking of ineptitude, there are also a couple of serious French mistakes in the labelling: the French national flag is referred to as the tricouleur, when it is of course known as the tricolore. In the label of a Renoir drawing (this mistake is in the catalogue as well) a woman is described as washing her stockings when she is clearly doing no such thing. Femme ... s'essuyant le bras means "woman wiping her arm"; someone has mistaken bras for bas, which means stocking.

All that said, there are still a few outstanding pieces in the show. Most impressive of all is a large pastel portrait by Berthe Morisot, representing her pregnant sister. It is a work that unusually combines intimacy and gravitas, a conjunction echoed in the fact that the sister is dressed in black, presumably in mourning for a close relative: birth and death nearly coinciding. Berthe later married Manet's brother, but there is something poignant in the understanding we feel between one sister who is still almost certainly a virgin and the other about to be a mother.

One of the things that may strike a contemporary viewer is the age of women who are already wives and mothers; girls became mothers much younger a century ago, and this seems to give even quite young women an unexpected maturity and seriousness. The theme is pervasive in the exhibition too because of the increased interest in infancy and childhood in the 19th century. Thus the society portraitist Helleu too has a picture of his wife, still perfectly coiffed, asleep with her infant daughter on her breast.

Virginity and motherhood within a respectable marriage were both, however, to some extent privileges of the middle and upper classes. Since there was little or no premarital sex with girls from good families, there was widespread prostitution - far more a part of everyday life, as all readers of contemporary French literature are aware, than it is today. And there was an extensive shadow-world of part-time prostitution, semi-prostitution and working-class girlfriends. From high-class kept women, serial paid mistresses, to shop-girls, bargirls, dancers at the opera or in nightclubs, all were available on different terms to be the companions of affluent middle-class men.

The abundant terminology of the time - demi-mondaine, cocotte, soubrette among others - testifies to the diversity of the semantic field and the many discriminations that could be made within it.

It is also an area of considerable interest to the artists of the time; this is, after all, the subject of Manet's Dejeuner sur l'herbe, and it is hinted at in the Bar aux Folies-Bergere, while his Olympia is about unambiguous prostitution. The subject should be clearly displayed as the reverse of the coin to the images of wives and mothers, but is in fact seriously underrepresented. There are a couple of faces of prostitutes by Toulouse-Lautrec, surely as unhelpful an illustration of the theme as could be imagined. There is a little picture of three midinettes arm-in-arm, but it is not even in the same section.

The one picture that does give an intense feeling of dark sexuality beyond the approved world of marriage is a head and shoulders drawing in black chalk by Carolus-Duran, another of the memorable images in the exhibition. The girl is dressed expensively and glamorously in an evening gown that leaves the shoulders, the highlight of the composition, and much of the bust exposed - a concession in formal evening wear at a time when a woman could not go out in the day without being fully covered, neck to ankle.

Artists' models are another area of ambiguity: they were often prostitutes or the mistresses of artists. Not until after the middle of the 19th century were academies allowed to employ female models. From the Renaissance onwards, students almost always drew from male models. The Royal Academy in London was in fact a pioneer in employing female models, but in the present show a small and intense picture by Fantin-Latour celebrates the reform that permitted female models to be used in academic classes.

Fantin-Latour is also the author of another masterpiece in the exhibition, a beautiful little black chalk drawing of a girl working at a piece of embroidery; the intensity and the crackling delicacy of the fine linework is like a natural metaphor of the attention he is seeking to convey in the picture.

The other really outstanding work, alongside so many, alas, less remarkable, is again by Morisot, and shows a woman occupied with her toilette. She sits, stripped to the waist, and we see her from the back, as she lifts both arms above her head in an eternally feminine gesture of arranging her long hair. Her reflection in the wardrobe mirror is slightly but tantalisingly different; and the face remains vacant. Morisot preserves the privacy of this girl in a moment of intimate self-absorption.

Modern Woman: Daughters And Lovers 1850-1918, Drawings From The Musee D'orsay, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, to June 24.