Artwork of the day

March Morning, John Atkinson Grimshaw, 19th century, oil on canvas, Private Collection

This painting from the Victorian painter Grimshaw -known for his night and landscape paintings- is unusually similar to this March morning in Athens.

Picture from: http://www.bridgemanart.com

Rejected artwork of the day

The death of Marat, Jacques Louis David, 1793, oil on canvas, Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels, Belgium

 

Although it's always good to remember what followed, it's probably not suitable during a National Day celebration.

Picture from http://www.bridgemanart.com

Artwork of the day

Bastille Day at Lorient 1892, Henry Moret, 1892, oil on canvas, Galerie L'Ergastere, Paris, France

   Picture from http://www.bridgemanart.com

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

Proteus, Cy Twombly, 1984, Synthetic polymer, coloured pencil and graphite on paper 

In memory of Cy Twombly who died yesterday, 5/7/2011.

For an obituary look at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/jul/06/cy-twombly-obituary

Picture from Gallery 1 in http://www.cytwombly.info/

Artwork of the day

Self Portrait, Peter Paul Rubens, 1638-1640, oil on canvas, Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna 

 

434 years since Rubens' birth. He was born on 28 June 1577 and became one of the major exponents of Baroque.

Artwork of the day

Rue Transnonain, Honoré Daumier, 1834, lithograph

It should be obvious by now that I'm a big fan of 19th century French Realism. Daumier is particularly dear to me as his art is meant to be both humorous and real, a critique to the social, political and economic situation of 19th century France and serving eventually as a visual history of Daumier's times. In this case it is a tragic event that Daumier depicts and immortalizes in his art. Rue Transonain was created in 1834 and shows the aftermath of a real event in this Parisian route. In April 1834 during a social unrest, governmental troops entered a building and killed all its inhabitants. The lithograph depicts one single room and lives to the imagination of the viewer the scenery in the rest of the building. Death is present everywhere in the scene. The man in the foreground that wears his night robe was probably dragged out of his bed and killed. A baby lies beneath him, an old man right next to him. With this work Daumier criticizes the violence of the army, but also the ill decisions of a monarchy that had little concern for the poor citizens of the country.