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https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019...he-artist/

EXCERPT: “It’s annoying they’re not men,” Édouard Manet wrote to fellow artist Henri Fantin-Latour, after meeting Berthe and Edma Morisot, two sisters from the Parisian upper crust who were promising painters. He found them “charming” and feared that because they were women, their accomplishments would inevitably go to waste. Manet thought the Morisot sisters should “further the cause of painting by marrying académiciens,” members of the jury who selected which works to display at the Académie des Beaux-Arts’s annual salon. The possibility that the Morisots might actually become artists did not seem to occur to him. Manet envisioned the Morisot sisters might make their mark in the annals of art as counselors to men in power—by influencing their tastes and sympathies, and convincing them of the worth of outsider artists (such as Manet himself).

Edma gave up her practice when she married in 1869. The next year Berthe destroyed the entirety of her own oeuvre and fell into a creative fallow period. She considered giving up painting for good. But though Berthe shared the same background as her sister, something allowed her to pick up the brush again. Perhaps it was in part a freedom born of being single. “People repeat ceaselessly that woman is born to love but that’s what’s hardest for her,” she wrote. “It’s the poets who’ve written the women lovers and ever since we’ve been playing Juliet for ourselves.” She did eventually get married (to Manet’s younger brother, Eugène), but waited until the age of thirty-thirty, when women were more likely to be widowed than plan a wedding.

And yet even this feels like a pittance, given the perennial institutional oversight of Morisot’s legacy. Until now, she has been relegated to the provinces and as a side act to Monet at the Marmottan. The Musée d’Orsay, guardian of the Impressionists, has ignored her through its thirty-year history. Since the museum’s opening in 1986, this is the fourth exhibition devoted to a woman artist. Many of the French women academics I know, though they consider themselves feminist, refuse to bring feminism into their work for fear of no longer being seen as objective. The laurels of universalism are still upheld as a goal here in France, leaving scars in the form of silence—but the winds do seem to be shifting.

You’ve already seen Morisot even if you’ve never heard of her. She starred as Manet’s model in paintings such as The Balcony (1869), where she was the languorous brunette with a half a scowl and a sharp gaze. The men in her life—and there were some important ones—loved looking at her looking.

[...] Morisot was working at a time when women were not allowed to take anatomy lessons for fear they would be sullied by impure thoughts. Women were believed to lack the abstracting powers necessary to turn nakedness into nudes. Given the way women were told to comport themselves in private, it is highly probable Morisot never so much as looked at herself without clothes on in the mirror, and she did not think about reversing the usual gender roles by painting male models. Morisot sat for Manet eleven times, sometimes for uncomfortably long sessions, while Manet never sat for Morisot.

But Morisot’s fluid bodies also ask what a person might be. There are those who believe her work’s lack of polish demands the reader imagine their way through the ambiguities. And the way she used paint was just as interestingly strange as the subjects she painted. Her paintings tend to be as thick in the center as the belly of a Turner sunset, then spread out so thin at the edges that the canvas shows through. At the time, this was ridiculed as exhibiting “feminine” hastiness.

Degas famously stated that Morisot made a painting like you make a hat. But the method also works to emphasize the subject, liberating her from her physical context—a context in which her body was valued as her only means of worth, be it by marriage or prostitution. In Portrait of Mlle L. (1885) or in one of Morisot’s self-portraits (1885), the bare edges of the canvas suggest that the woman has agency, physical and otherwise; in Morisot’s garden scenes or beflowered interiors, the dresses melt into the background, refuting the viewer’s possession of the figure. Morisot’s messy brushstrokes—some of the most daring among her contemporaries’—suggest that “woman” is pure fiction, an idea bursting at the seams of the experience it supposedly names.

If realism had been about classifying and controlling the otherness of femininity—think of Ingres’s odalisques—Impressionism offered an escape. But while the new mode would stage its battles on the terrain of the female nude, the angles and surfaces of those bodies, women were excluded from defining what modernity meant both as an aesthetic practice and as a social experience. Morisot’s erasure from the history of Impressionism has insidious origins in the role women were supposed to play... (MORE - images, details)

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