Morisot painted outdoors when she could, a dicey practice at a time when respectable, unaccompanied women passed their lives under what amounted to house arrest—she was liable to be stared at by passersby and flocked by children. By historical good fortune for Morisot, the bourgeois home was becoming a socially and psychologically charged arena for artistic exploration. The mood is tender but subtly tense. The new mother is transfixed but tired. She may be wondering what she has let herself in for.
Even her infants register as separate creatures, though years short of being aware of it. Are they cute? A knockout portrait of red-haired Julie at sixteen, in , takes apparent inspiration from the Symbolist painters who were then on the rise, notably Edvard Munch , to vivify a slightly sullen, alarmingly beautiful teen-ager. About half of the sixty-eight paintings in the show remain in private collections.
But, aside from a few partial failures that instructively exemplify risks Morisot took, they are all more than museum-worthy.
Morisot is still emerging from the margins of the Impressionist club of certified alphas, betas, and minions, but the priority for valuing her work is not just the issuing of retroactive membership.
In a different world, Morisot would be the doyenne of an established tradition that built and expanded on her example. Her subsequent avatars were discontinuous until recently.
One who comes to mind is Joan Mitchell , by far the best of the second-generation Abstract Expressionists. At times, nearly every stroke seems a sudden, fresh event. In Reclining Woman in Grey , a fashionable Parisian reclines on a settee, though her dress—a frenzy of fast brushwork—is almost undistinguishable from the background. When light hits the strokes, they seem still wet. Morisot, more than any of her contemporaries, was skilled in embodying her female subjects with selfhood.
Morisot liked to paint outdoors when she could, a practice which invited scandal given that at the time, when women were expect to leave home with a chaperone.
Add to this the fact that painting indoors was still the gold standard for all artists, regardless of gender. At the start, her outdoor works, while still brushy and loose, looked largely like real life. In the splendid Reading The Green Umbrella , from , a female figure is bent over a book on the grass. The titular umbrella lays discarded to her left. The painting reads as a fleeting moment of leisure, free of domestic duty.
Now compare that canvas with the later work The Garden at Maurecourt ca. Here, figuration nearly becomes abstraction. Morisot was restless, and in the last years of her life her studies of motion gave way to scenes of introspection. The rapid brushstrokes which had defined her practice for years became clearer, and her images came back into focus. Considered the first distinctly modern movement in art, Impressionism rejected all the rules about naturalism and realism in painting, paving the way for the modernist styles that followed.
At the time shunned by powerful academic art institutions, artists such as Edouard Manet , Monet , Edgar Degas , Renoir , Camille Pissarro and Alfred Sisley are now regarded as revolutionaries who had changed the course or art history.
On the other hand, Berthe Morisot , one of the founding members of the movement, is not as well-known today as her male Impressionist colleagues. The work of Berthe Morisot is now on view in a major and long-overdue exhibition at Barnes Foundation. Titled Berthe Morisot: Woman Impressionist , the show explores the significant yet under-appreciated contributions of this seminal impressionist artist, providing an insight into a defining chapter in art history.
The participants of the second Impressionist exhibition which took place in in Paris was described by a critic as "five or six lunatics, one of which is a woman.
The French painter was celebrated for the loosest, least finished-looking technique of all impressionists which seems indefinite at first glance but invites the viewer for contemplation. Full of color and light, her paintings demonstrate the artist's remarkable mastery of capturing fleeting shades and shadows. For her talent and skills, Berthe Morisot was loved by the public and greatly respected and admired and treated as equal by her male colleagues, by whom Morisot is today greatly overshadowed in art history.
The exhibition Berthe Morisot: Woman Impressionist will provide a unique opportunity for the public to experience a collection of Morisot's work in the context of Barnes's extensive collection of impressionist, post-impressionist and early modernist paintings.
Introducing an important new scholarship, the exhibition will both illuminate and reassert the artist's role as an essential figure within this revolutionary movement.
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