Women and Impressionism Part 1

Women artists

Impressionism has been widely accepted as the style that first introduced modernism in art. Modernism in both the techniques used by artists and the subjects represented – mainly the emerging industrial city life. Space –as a reality and as a subject in art- is thus a very important part of Impressionism.

Impressionism also saw the rise of a number of women artists like Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Eva Gonzalès and Marie Bracquemond.

What spaces are represented in the art of women impressionists and is there a difference with the spaces depicted by their male colleagues? This question has been central especially to feminist critique. According to Griselda Pollock the spaces represented by women painters are those traditionally related to the bourgeois women of the period: areas or areas related with acceptable female bourgeois leisure, involving child care (picture 1), pass time and intimate garden scenes (picture 2).

 

 Picture 1. Mary Cassatt, The Bath, 1892, oil on canvas, The Art Institute of Chicago

 

  Picture 2. Berthe Morisot, La Chasse aux papillons, 1874, oil on canvas, 46 x 56 cm, Musée d'Orsay, Paris

The public sphere was not a space where a woman of the bourgeois class could be seen on her own. The honourable woman was secluded in the domestic sphere and thus the places she depicted as an artist were limited to what was expected from her.

These boundaries of domestic space can be seen in the spatial order of the paintings, which constitute the second way in which Pollock views space and femininity. For Pollock, the space in paintings by women impressionists displays the use of facture, demarcation and compression in order to show the boundaries inside the picture itself but at the same time the boundaries of the city, the boundaries between the domestic and the public. If we came back to Morisot’s and Cassatt’s paintings examined earlier we can see that we, as viewers, enter the world of the bourgeois woman, experience it. But at the same time we are denied any intimacy as those represented avoid any eye contact. In the end, we are invited to a world where women can be observed but they themselves cannot observe.

References

Pollock, G. 2003, Vision and Difference, London & New York: Routledge Classics

Artwork of the day

Mary Cassatt, Woman in Black at the Opera, 1879, oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

In the 19^th century Parisian bourgeois society the public sphere was a forbidden area for a honourable woman on her own but as in all rules there was an exception. There was one public space that was actually available to both men and women: the opera. This painting by Mary Cassatt has been –for obvious reasons- central when discussing feminism and 19^th century French art. When compared with paintings from male artists, striking differences can be noted.  For example in Renoir’s famous La Loge some the female protagonist seems to invite with the position of her body, the clothes she is wearing and the abstract look the gaze of the viewer while at the same time she avoids direct eye contact with him/ her.

Auguste Renoir, La Loge, 1874, oil on canvas, Courtauld Institute Galleries, London

On the contrary, in Cassatt’s Woman in Black at the Opera, the woman is actually involved in looking turning her head away from the viewer. This is not only an apparent defiance of traditional roles from a female artist, but a defiance by at the same time a critical departure from the part of the Cassatt from the traditional representations expected from her as a woman, but as an artist as well. She enters the world of artistic creativity and defies the traditional role of art object assigned to her. A sign of Cassatt's realisation and deep understanding of these social conventions might be the man in the background who has turned his head away from the spectacle and concentrates on the protagonist of the painting, although she seems to have not noticed him.

Artwork of the day

Berthe Morisot, The Cradle, 1872

One of the most famous female artists of all time, Berthe Morisot is known as the impressionist who painted the 'domestic' life of the bourgeois women of 19th century Paris. Thus, her work features prominently in the writings of modern feminists like Griselda Pollock.
This painting, now in the Musee d'Orsay of Paris, reflects the life expected of a bourgeois woman and the roles she was expected to play: that of the dutiful wife and loving mother.