What I find more interesting is that, except for a short period when she was experimenting with the sort of brushwork that interested a number of Impressionist landscape painters, her brushwork was generally free of conventions, never settling into a regular language of paint handling for particular subjects or scenes. But I will leave to others the discussion of how interested she was in making a social commentary on the spaces she depicted. And there is no question that her depictions of women at their toilette are free from the sexualized gaze of the men around her. Myers, writing in the exhibition catalog, suggests that Morisot’s choice of modern women as subjects was strategic, responding to contemporary market interests and depictions of the subject by her peers as well as writings that hailed modern life as the appropriate subject of modern painting. Students of Morisot’s work have discussed the limited mobility of bourgeoise women, which precluded many of the subjects, such as bars and music halls, that other Impressionist painters favored. Photo courtesy The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY. But what paintings! The backgrounds of a number of them display brushwork that breaks free of any notion of representation. They are studies of fabrics and flesh, experiments in how much she can depict with how little definition, paintings of suggestion. Morisot does not reveal the inner character of her models, all young and attractive. The second gallery presents paintings of individual women – six, mostly half-length views on the far wall, and several women in interiors and at their toilette – but it would be incorrect to term them portraits. Close study reveals that the woman’s veil and many of the smaller details of the landscape were added later, after that first, outdoors campaign of painting. But as with work by many of her contemporaries, the painting had a longer evolution. “Reading (The Green Umbrella)” (1873), showing a young woman in a white dress sitting on the grass, has that desired quality of spontaneity and freshness. The earliest group of paintings in the exhibit reflect contemporary interest in “plein air” (outdoor) painting, and the emphasis on painting “au premier coup,” or all in one sitting. Her paintings are set in domestic interiors, private gardens and the occasional more public spaces of parks.
#Berthe morisat taining period artwork professional#
She used the family salon as her studio and largely painted her own family – Eugène and their daughter, Julie – friends, household servants and occasional professional models who worked for other artists she knew. She married Eugène Manet, brother of the painter, who supported her artistic ambitions. Her emphasis on figure painting reflected the life she led and the social restrictions on a woman of her class. Morisot’s recorded output of 423 paintings included 247 figure paintings, 47 portraits and 98 landscapes. She showed work with respected dealers and exhibited in seven of the eight exhibitions organized by the Impressionists. Berthe Morisot was in the center of Paris’ circle of ambitious painters and writers. Manet, mother of the painter Édouard and his brothers, Gustave and Eugène, and after Edma married, the Morisots began holding their own weekly salons. They attended the weekly salon held by Mme. They studied privately with several painters, including Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, and had work accepted in the Paris Salon. The artist and her sister Edma had traditional training for non-academic artists of the period. Morisot was from an haute bourgeois family that, unusually, encouraged its daughters’ art education and Berthe’s desire to be a serious painter. I discovered an artist whose ongoing concern was with painting itself, and who pushed the possibilities of paint further than any of her contemporaries – so far that some of her brushwork and incorporation of accidental drips of liquid paint look like painting of the 1940s-50s. But I was asking the wrong questions of them, and Berthe Morisot: Woman Impressionist at the Barnes Foundation was a revelation. I had seen a small number of her paintings, one at a time in one museum or another and found them indefinite, lacking compelling focus. Oil on fabric, Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of the Hanna Fund, 1950.89.
0 kommentar(er)
