孙女大学二年级的习作

Bibliographic essay: Gendered experiences in French impression

Impressionism was a 19th century art movement that started in Paris in France. The rise of a non-aristocratic middle class, or the bourgeoisie, created due to the diminished importance of the monarchy as well as industrialisation creating the first businessmen and the construction of new infrastructure such as railways, caused significant changes in French society. The impressionists sought to paint their experiences of the novelty of new social phenomena, reflecting contemporary, modern life by painting scenes of bourgeois leisure such as scenes of middle class men and women out in a park enjoying the weather or having a picnic in quick, loose brushstrokes in a way that was less realistic but more expressive.  Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt were two prominent female impressionist artists who painted vastly different things in different ways than their male counterparts at that time. This bibliographic essay seeks to understand how genders and gendered spaces were depicted by male and female French impressionist artists by synthesising major ideas discussed by art historians on the topic.  

 

Pollock’s chapter titled “Modernity and the spaces of femininity” discusses how female artists during the French Impressionist movement represented different subjects than their male counterparts in their artwork through the work of female artists Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt. Pollock argues this by explaining differences in gendered experiences of space and ‘the gaze.’ In the former, Pollock highlights how the female experience of French

Modernity was different from that of the male experience due to the bourgeois class functioning through inequality and difference in socio-economic categories and gender (95), resulting in limited access for women of public spaces such as cafes and bars freely accessed by men and commonly depicted in their work (78-79). When women are in public, they become objects of visual pleasure for the male ‘flâneur’ (94-100), hence in the works of male artists Degas and Renoir, women are depicted as beautiful, visual spectacles, delighting the presumably male spectator (108-109). Women like Morisot and Cassatt instead paint their female subjects in public spaces as constrained and uneasy in being exposed (107) or engaging with the act of looking in a way that prevents objectification (109). In private spaces, their paintings of women are shallower in space creating a sense of compression, and the female subject is placed close to the front of the picture threatening protrusion beyond the picture space into the viewer’s space (89). In outdoor locations such as balconies and gardens, female artists highlight the sense of seclusion and enclosure (90) by refusing to depict the open and comfortable landscape behind the figure, reinforcing that sense of compression and cramp-ness in Cassatt’s work (89) or divide the space with a boundary such as a balustrade or embankment, pushing the female subject of the work into a small space in the painting and demarcating the boundary between public and domestic spaces, or masculine and feminine spaces in Morisot’s work (81-87). 

 

Nochlin further analyses how Morisot’s work toes the boundary of what is the visual norm in impressionist art. In her essay “Morisot’s Wet Nurse: The Construction of Work and Leisure in Impressionist Painting,” she argues that Morisot’s images of wet nurses are noteworthy because they are work scenes, in this case of women nursing the babies of other women for profit (54-56), rather than the typical bourgeois or urban leisure scene we commonly associate with Impressionism (57). Her male peers would often conflate women's work with the notion of leisure itself (59), positioning them as barmaids or dancers in an objectifying way (60), glorifying their work and physical effort to that of entertainment and pleasure for the male viewer, ultimately depicting women as objects of visual pleasure as Pollock says. Domestic labour was often excluded in their art due to that type of work being seen as natural to women rather than actual labour (61). 

 

Nochlin notes how it was uncommon for middle class women to breastfeed their own children, hiring a wet nurse to do it instead (63).  However, Morisot's paintings of her child with her wet nurse did not seek to document this particular social phenomenon. Instead she used the motif to experiment with her impressionistic style, thereby helping with the construction of a specific iconology of leisure (65). The wet nurse is depicted less as an individual but more like a part of the scene, causing the painting to feel like a sort of human

still life (66). 

 

An interesting thing that both art historians discuss alongside gender is social class. Pollock points out that there are the depictions of different classes of women, of bourgeois ladies and of dancers and prostitutes. However, the lower social classes of women are only depicted in art by men as upper class female artists could not access those spaces. Nochlin notes that wet nurses, who were of a lower social class, were often from the rural countryside. In Deborah Bershad’s essay “Looking, Power and Sexuality: Degas’ Woman with a Lorgnette,” she reinforces and further contextualises the ideas of ‘the gaze’ raised by Pollock, explaining how public spaces such as the theatre and the race track were places to engage in seeing and being seen, and where class and sexual relations were acted out (102), saturating public spaces with sexual meanings (99-100). She further draws on Michel Foucault's idea of the panopticon, that being able to see gives control and power to the viewer, that looking was a male domain and a metaphor for male sexuality (102).  This is exemplified by how most impressionists artists’ work reinforce the convention that men looked and that women were looked at (100). By explaining Degas’s interest in motion as a desire to look and therefore a desire for power and knowledge (102), she argues that Degas’s images of a woman looking directly at the viewer through a pair of hand-held spectacles, and active and masculine role, as him questioning the viewer’s role in relation to the image as well as possibly questioning his own role as an observer and recorder of images and revealing his anxieties about his sexuality (102-103). As Pollock states in  “The Gaze and The Look: Women with Binoculars— A Question of Difference,” Bershad connects sexuality to surveillance of women in public (111). Pollock also notes how the binoculars or lorgnette, an instrument for enhancing vision, conceals the eyes, pointing out the conjunction between the power of looking and the power of concealment (112), pointing out the sense of unease of being looked at by someone you cannot see clearly, and connecting back to the idea of the panopticon and of the power in looking.

 

Bershad does note that “perhaps the lines between public and private looking were contiguous with those between public and private women, between prostitutes and ‘respectable’ women,” acknowledging that the experience of looking must have varied amongst women of different classes. Considering that the theatre, particularly ballet, as well as race tracks were spaces saturated with prostitutes and where different social classes converged (96-97), and were referenced in impressionist art, relations between social class and the female gender in impressionist art is a topic worth further discussion. 

 

A close reading of leading academic sources on gender and impressionist art reveal the complicated connections of contemporary social conditions, its help in the development of the gendered domains within the act of looking, and how that contributes to the formation of gendered spaces. It shows that further exploration is needed of the nuances between the experiences within the same gender but of different social classes, noting how social class and gender should not be conflated and that the experiences of each artist of the same gender can still differ drastically. 

 

Works Cited:

Nochlin, Linda. "Morisot's Wet Nurse: The Construction of Work and Leisure in Impressionist Painting." Women, art, and power and other essays, Routledge, 2018, p.54-72. 

 

Pollock, G. "Modernity and the spaces of femininity."  Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and Histories of Art (3rd ed.), Routledge, 2003, p.70-127,  http://t.cn/AXN1CWhC  

 

Bershad, Deborah. “Looking, Power and Sexuality: Degas’ Women with a Lorgnette.” Dealing with Degas : representations of women and the politics of vision, New York Universe, 1992, p. 95-106. 

 

Pollock, Griselda. “The Gaze and The Look: Women with Binoculars— A Question of Difference.” Dealing with Degas : representations of women and the politics of vision, New York Universe, 1992, p.106-133.