Arts, Faculty of
Art History, Visual Art and Theory, Department of
DSpace
UBCV
Krogh, Schuyler
Master of Arts - MA
University of British Columbia
The category of “woman artist” has proven itself to be a perpetually troubling object for the history of French art in the late nineteenth century. Berthe Morisot (1841-1895) is an especially troubling figure within this category as an artist who declined public alignment with the category of “woman artist” during her lifetime but has nevertheless been repeatedly classified as such in later scholarship and curation, and whose paintings of domestic scenes have been dialectically opposed to scenes of modernity located in public space. My project addresses the problematics in this scholarship by analyzing Morisot’s work as inscribing specific conditions of modernity through her navigation of the categories of artist and woman. My project will specifically address her paintings of maternal scenes as the sites that most directly grapple with the intersections of modernity, gender, and the woman artist’s own subjectivity when confronted with the category of mother. The first section of the thesis addresses Morisot’s paintings of her elder sister Edma Pontillon (1839-1921) and her daughters from the early 1870s as sites of mediation and confrontation between the role of mother, as occupied by Edma, and artist, as occupied by Berthe. The second section addresses Morisot’s paintings of her daughter Julie Manet (1878-1966) and Julie’s wet nurse as sites of a complex series of deferrals of labour, with the intrusion of capital into the private sphere. Finally, Morisot’s paintings of Julie with her doll, with her father Eugène Manet (1833-1892), and with Morisot herself explore Morisot’s simultaneous occupation of the roles of mother and “woman artist.”
BIRTHING THE MODERN: MODERNITY, MATERNITY, AND SUBJECTIVITY IN THE ART OF BERTHE MORISOT by Schuyler Krogh B.A., Kenyon College, 2015A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES (Art History and Theory) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) January 2022 © Schuyler Krogh, 2022 Explanatory Note This MA thesis, dated January 2022, is a revised version of one initially submitted in August 2019. The initial version of the thesis was subsequently found to inadequately reference the work of another scholar, and it has been permanently withdrawn. The current version of the thesis has been thoroughly revised to provide appropriate credit to previous work and has been re-examined and approved in this light. This 2022 version of the thesis supersedes the previous version for all citation purposes. ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, a thesis entitled: Birthing the Modern: Modernity, Maternity, and Subjectivity in the Art of Berthe Morisot submitted by Schuyler Krogh in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Art History and Theory Examining Committee: Catherine M. Soussloff, Professor, AHVA, UBC Supervisor Erin Silver, Assistant Professor, AHVA, UBC Supervisory Committee Member iii Abstract The category of “woman artist” has proven itself to be a perpetually troubling object for the history of French art in the late nineteenth century. Berthe Morisot (1841-1895) is an especially troubling figure within this category as an artist who declined public alignment with the category of “woman artist” during her lifetime but has nevertheless been repeatedly classified as such in later scholarship and curation, and whose paintings of domestic scenes have been dialectically opposed to scenes of modernity located in public space. My project addresses the problematics in this scholarship by analyzing Morisot’s work as inscribing specific conditions of modernity through her navigation of the categories of artist and woman. My project will specifically address her paintings of maternal scenes as the sites that most directly grapple with the intersections of modernity, gender, and the woman artist’s own subjectivity when confronted with the category of mother. The first section of the thesis addresses Morisot’s paintings of her elder sister Edma Pontillon (1839-1921) and her daughters from the early 1870s as sites of mediation and confrontation between the role of mother, as occupied by Edma, and artist, as occupied by Berthe. The second section addresses Morisot’s paintings of her daughter Julie Manet (1878-1966) and Julie’s wet nurse as sites of a complex series of deferrals of labour, with the intrusion of capital into the private sphere. Finally, Morisot’s paintings of Julie with her doll, with her father Eugène Manet (1833-1892), and with Morisot herself explore Morisot’s simultaneous occupation of the roles of mother and “woman artist.” iv Lay Summary This thesis examines images of maternity by Berthe Morisot (1841-1895), a woman artist in the Impressionist movement in nineteenth century France. Traditionally, art historical discourse has separated Morisot’s paintings of domestic spaces and subject matter from other artists painting scenes of public life, and has viewed the latter as more “modern” than the former. Through a re-examination of ideas of modernity and a re-reading of Morisot’s images of motherhood, I explore the specific iterations and expressions of modernity found within these paintings. v Preface This thesis is original, unpublished, and independent work of the author, Schuyler Krogh. vi Table of Contents ABSTRACT .............................................................................................................................................. III LAY SUMMARY ...................................................................................................................................... IV PREFACE ................................................................................................................................................... V TABLE OF CONTENTS ......................................................................................................................... VI LIST OF FIGURES ................................................................................................................................ VII ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ..................................................................................................................... IX CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................ 10 CHAPTER 2: PAINTING EDMA........................................................................................................... 19 2.1 THE CRADLE ............................................................................................................................... 19 2.2 WOMAN AND CHILD ON A BALCONY .......................................................................................... 26 2.3 AT MAURECOURT: HIDE AND SEEK, UNDER THE LILACS AT MAURECOURT AND THE BUTTERFLY CHASE ............................................................................................................................................. 28 CHAPTER 3: THE WET NURSE, ARTIST, AND MOTHER: MATERNAL AND ARTISTIC LABOR IN MORISOT’S PAINTINGS OF WET NURSES ................................................................ 35 CHAPTER 4: JULIE AS A YOUNG GIRL WITH HER MOTHER, FATHER, AND DOLL ........ 47 4.1 JULIE MANET AND HER FATHER ................................................................................................. 47 4.2 DAUGHTER, DOLL: REFERRED MOTHERHOOD IN PAINTINGS OF JULIE WITH HER DOLL ........... 52 4.3 SELF-PORTRAIT AS ARTIST AND MOTHER: BERTHE MORISOT WITH JULIE MANET................... 57 BIBLIOGRAPHY ..................................................................................................................................... 63 APPENDIX ................................................................................................................................................ 66 vii List of Figures Figure 1. Édouard Manet. The Railway. 1873. Oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. Figure 2. Berthe Morisot. Woman and Child on the Balcony. 1872. Oil on canvas. The Athenaeum, Connecticut. Figure 3. Berthe Morisot. The Cradle. 1872. Oil on canvas. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Figure 4. Albrecht Dürer. Melancolia I. 1514. Engraving. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Figure 5. Édouard Manet. Au Jardin. 1870. Oil on canvas. Private collection. Figure 6. Berthe Morisot. Hide and Seek. 1873. Oil on canvas. Private collection. Figure 7. Berthe Morisot. Under the Lilacs at Maurecourt. 1874. Oil on canvas. Private Collection. Figure 8. Berthe Morisot. The Butterfly Chase. 1874. Oil on canvas. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Figure 9. Berthe Morisot. The Wet Nurse. 1880. Oil on canvas. Private collection. Figure 10. Berthe Morisot. Julie and Her Nurse, Angéle. 1880. Oil on canvas. Ny Carlsberg Glytotek, Copenhagen. Figure 11. Berthe Morisot. Julie and Doll. 1884. Oil on canvas. Private Collection Figure 12. Berthe Morisot. Cottage Interior or Little Girl with a Doll. 1886. Oil on canvas. Musée d’Ixelles, Brussels. Figure 13. Berthe Morisot. Doll on the Veranda, 1884. Oil on canvas. Private collection. Figure 14. Berthe Morisot. Eugène Manet at the Isle of Wight, 1875. Oil on canvas. Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris. Figure 15. Berthe Morisot. Eugène Manet and His Daughter at Bougival. 1881. Oil on canvas. Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris. Figure 16. Berthe Morisot. Julie and Eugène Manet. 1883. Oil on canvas. Private Collection. Figure 17. Berthe Morisot. The lesson in the garden. 1886. Oil on canvas. Private collection. Figure 18. Berthe Morisot. Self-Portrait with a Palette. 1885. Oil on canvas. Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris. Figure 19. Berthe Morisot. Self-Portrait with Julie Manet. 1885. Oil on canvas. Private Collection. Figure 20. Berthe Morisot. Portrait of Berthe Morisot and Her Daughter at a Window (Study). 1887. Oil on canvas. Private Collection. viii Figure 21. Berthe Morisot. The Drawing Lesson. c. 1889-90. Drypoint etching. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. ix Acknowledgements I am eternally grateful to the faculty, staff, and students of UBC who have supported, encouraged, and inspired my work in this field. I owe particular and deep thanks to my advisor, Dr. Catherine Soussloff, for her rigorous questions, insightful edits, and uncompromising standards of excellence. I thank Dr. Erin Silver for her inspiring excitement, assuaging fears, and stimulating discussions on the female body in art. I would particularly like to thank the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, and especially Naomi Sawada, for the opportunity to teach and joyfully share contemporary questions of art and feminism with audiences both within and outside the field of art history. Thank you for providing a space to apply and share what I have learned and for teaching me to listen to so many voices I had not yet heard. I can never express adequate thanks to my parents, Stacy and Paul Krogh, for their support throughout my education. Thank you for your endless patience in listening to explanations of papers not yet written and for your uncanny knack for always asking the right question. Thank you to my grandmother, Kippy, for never wavering in your belief in my education even when the details slipped from memory. Thank you to my friends, Tracey, Kristen, and Hetty, for years of late-night conversations and fierce love. And thank you to Ian Craig for all of your love and support. Krogh 10 Chapter 1: Introduction The category of “woman artist” has proven itself to be a perpetually troubling object of study for the history of French art in the late nineteenth century. Berthe Morisot (1841-1895) is an especially problematic figure within this category. As an artist who declined public alignment with the category of “woman artist” during her lifetime, she has nevertheless been repeatedly classified as such in later scholarship and exhibitions. My project analyzes Morisot’s work as inscribing specific conditions of modernity through her navigation of the categories of artist and woman. Here, I analyze Morisot’s paintings of maternal scenes as the sites that most directly grapple with the intersections of modernity, gender, and subjectivity. Morisot painted relatively few maternal scenes in the strictest sense. There are five paintings of Berthe’s elder sister Edma Pontillon (1839-1921) and Edma’s daughters from the early 1870s, three paintings of Morisot herself with her daughter Julie Manet (1878-1966), and three “paternal scenes” depicting Julie and Morisot’s husband Eugène Manet (1833-1892), brother of the artist Édouard Manet (1832-1883). Morisot also painted scenes of wet nurses taking care of her child. The first section of my thesis examines the dilemma of the woman artist between her career and motherhood, and will analyze how these tensions manifest in The Cradle, Musée d’Orsay (1872). The subsequent sections of the thesis further develop Morisot’s inscription of gender and capital through the complex deferrals of labor and subjectivity in the wet nurse paintings (1880), the father-daughter scenes, and Morisot’s self-portraits with Julie. In her 1988 essay “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity,” Griselda Pollock argued for the existence of a female spectator and gazer, but one who was socially excluded from what was termed to be the spaces of Parisian modernity. T. J. Clark had already defined these spaces in his 1984 book The Painting of Modern Life as the public spaces of the street, the brothels, and the Krogh 11 theatres of Paris. These were the places where the public and private blur, where the prototypical male spectator looks, gazes, stares, scrutinizes, and watches, bringing to bear the mutually intruding forces of sex and capital. Manet’s Olympia and A Bar at the Folies-Bergère come from a tradition that invokes a male spectator as masculine. According to Pollock, it is necessary to acknowledge the way in which a feminine spectator is actually implied by these paintings. The exhibition of these paintings in the Salon forces the fille publique (woman of the streets) and the femme honnête (the respectable married woman) to confront each other, confounding the social and ideological distance between them.1 The presence of these paintings in the Salon introduced the idea of painting modernity through acknowledging the display and viewership of a work. Viewing those images was shocking due to the presence in the exhibition audience of wives, sisters and daughters who were facing a part of the public realm that would otherwise be invisible to them. For Pollock, the female gaze is the female spectator in the social, public space of the exhibition. The development of the historiography around representing women and modernity in Paris in the late nineteenth century has questioned the borders of this original oppositional dialectic between spaces of femininity and spaces of modernity. However, for the most part, this underlying grid still holds. Challenges have been mainly directed to understanding specific physical spaces that blur these gendered distinctions. Pollock acknowledged in 1999 that further work needed to be done to more accurately understand how women navigated the public spaces of Paris beyond the Salon.2 These public places are those that are both accessible to both respectable women and the male public, such as the parks of Paris. Sinéad Furlong-Clancy, in 1 Griseslda Pollock, Vision and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1988), 55-56. 2 Pollock, Vision and Difference, 56. Krogh 12 her book on depiction of the female body in late nineteenth century France, rigorously excavates the ways in which women and women artists claimed agency in action and in gaze while participating in the public parks and public fashions of Paris.3 In James Rubin’s 2010 book on Manet, the author addresses the divide between the domestic and the modern through the paradoxical relationship between immersion and externality in Manet’s oeuvre.4 When reading modernity into Manet’s pictures of women, it is the direct and confronting gaze from the woman to the viewer that proclaims the woman’s individual subjectivity. Rubin discusses Manet’s domestic scenes through the lens of the siege of Paris and wartime politics, where the ever-present threat of hunger and violence permeate supposedly enclosed domestic scenes – these scenes are made modern because of the war, e.g., the public sphere intrude inside.5 Here, however, I am not reading the feminine in the public. Rather, I am reimagining what it means to paint the feminine in the explicitly domestic sphere, and furthermore the domestic sphere par excellence – the places of the maternal. It is important to interrogate my use of the term “feminine” or “femininity”. Here, I agree with Dr. Furlong-Clancy’s use of the term and reading of Pollock on the subject. She writes: “A note on the term ‘femininity,’ which I approach with some critical hesitation, as so often in common usage it becomes an easy extension of an idealised form of ‘female’: typifying an ideal (‘feminine’) quality by which women are judged, whether morally, spiritually, or physically (and the same applies for male, 3 Sinéad Furlong-Clancy, The Depiction and Description of the Female Body in Nineteenth-Century French Art, Literature, and Society: Women in the Parks of Paris, 1848-1900 (New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2014), 18. This book was originally presented as the doctoral dissertation by Furlong-Clancy (Trinity College, Dublin, 2002), which I have not consulted. 4 See James Rubin, Manet: Initial M, Hand and Eye (Paris: Flammarion, 2010). 5 Rubin, “Global Dialogues: Modernity and Tradition” in Manet: Initial M, 47-49. Krogh 13 masculine, masculinity). To me ‘femininity’ denotes a (or, multiple) construction(s). Pollock writes of the “dominant ideologies of femininity” (10); the “feminine stereotype” (55), “bourgeois codes of femininity” (63), “femininity... as a positionality” (66), “the construction of femininity across the stages of women’s lives” (81). I agree that ‘feminine’ and ‘femininity’ cannot simply be interchangeable with ‘female,’ being terms which denote a non-critical espousal of traits deemed to be the ideal and/or essence of female experience/female-ness/womanhood, dependent upon the speaker or writer’s predilections (and the same applies to ‘masculine’ and ‘masculinity’).”6 I use “femininity” with a similar critical hesitation. Here, “femininity” should be understood as a series of iconographic and at times formal choices that construct a particular participation in bourgeois codes of gender attached to the upper-class female positionality. This includes expected roles of marriage, motherhood, and “proper” behavior in public. Thus, while this paper addresses “femininity” with an acknowledgment of the dangers of the term, I nevertheless find it useful in signaling the gendered codes attached to the term. The equally problematic nature of the term “feminine” and its close and even more problematic cousin, “beautiful,” have perpetually plagued studies on Morisot. Her contemporaries frequently lauded her for her feminine charms. In 1877, Georges Rivière raved, “Madame Morisot shows us in detail her talent so charming and so feminine; her watercolors, pastels, and oil paintings all have the spontaneity, that light and unpretentious elegance that 6 Furlong-Clancy, The Depiction and Description of the Female Body in Nineteenth-Century French Art, Literature, and Society: Women in the Parks of Paris, 1848-1900 (New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2014), xli-xlii. Citing Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art (London-New York: Routledge, 1988). Krogh 14 makes us admire her.”7 In the same year, the critic Arsene Houssaye compared her style to Manet’s by saying, “She copies Manet, but her delicate nature compels her to transform the unpolished facture that makes him a great painter into a fine, delicate, feminine touch.”8 The qualities for which Morisot was praised were specific formal ones – her bright palette, spontaneity, and emphasis on color over line, and were seen as specifically feminine formal choices. Anne Higonnet, who wrote an important biography on Morisot and as well as a book studying her images of women, places Morisot within the tradition of amateur women painters due to her feminine style and subject matter. In Higonnet’s view, Morisot refrained from engaging with the deeper questions that consumed the art circles around her.9 Furlong-Clancy points out the continuous framing of Morisot as “beautiful” in more contemporary scholarship as well. Furlong-Clancy observes that in the 2010 study on Morisot, titled Morisot: The Beautiful Painter, Jean Dominique Rey “writes of Morisot’s ‘intact charm; ‘a body of work as discreet as the woman who so diligently produced it, without fuss or show’ – as if these are proper attributes of femininity and important elements to be considered in a discussion of Morisot’s output.”10 There appears again and again reified in the descriptions of Morisot an unexamined conflation of Morisot the woman, deemed beautiful, and Morisot the painter, both appreciated and dismissed for being read as feminine. Rey writes that, “On the subject of Impressionism, about which everything has surely been said, it is worth noting –in the context of this books subject and approach—a phenomenon that has perhaps been insufficiently stated to date: that there is something feminine in the very 7 Georges Riviere, “L’Exposition des impressionnistes,” cited in Ruth Berson, The New Painting: Impressionism 1874-1886 (San Francisco, CA: Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, 1996), 179. 8 Quoted in Berson, The New Painting, 180. 9 Higonnet, Morisot, 31. 10 Furlong-Clancy, The Depiction and Description of the Female Body 24-26. Quoting Rey, Berthe Morisot (Paris, France: Flammarion, 2010), 49. Krogh 15 concept of impressionism, in its zest for the fleeting moment, the primacy of impressions over perception. It should, then, come as no surprise that the group included a woman from the outset, and that she should go on to become its longest-lasting member. … Berthe Morisot remains the female artist whose work best expressed, with such grace and freshness, the fleeting quality, the primacy of direct sensation over recollection that would now transform the art of painting and take it forward in new directions.”11 For Rey, the formal and conceptual style of Impressionism is clearly linked to an idea of a natural “feminine.” In writing on Morisot and motherhood, my framework for what constitutes the subject of motherhood and maternity will be both focused and broader than what might be considered the strictest sense. The painted maternal subject par excellence in European art is, of course, the Madonna and Child. The genre typically is most focused on mothers and infants or very small children, often closely intertwined with each other; i.e., a babe in arms or a mother at the cradle of her infant. Here, I will include that subject but then take a wider definition. My interest concerns how motherhood and modernity are intertwined and expressed in Morisot’s oeuvre. Therefore, I will also include Morisot’s paintings of wet nurses, who are engaged in maternal labor, and Morisot’s paintings of Julie with her doll as a kind of scene-within-a-scene exploration of motherhood. Furthermore, I will touch on Morisot’s three paternal scenes as a rare expansion or iteration of the genre. At times, some paintings will be included that are not strictly maternal scenes due to the models but depict importantly similar matter in idea, subject, and form. 11 Rey, Beautiful Painter, 64. Krogh 16 Carol Armstrong’s 2002 book Manet Manette approaches the idea of the woman artist through a reimagining and rereading of Manet. When Armstrong addresses the question of female subjectivity, she does so through the women depicted by Manet. Armstrong argues that Manet painted the model Victorine Meurant as “herself” in his 1862 portrait of her. For Armstrong, Manet’s figures of women subvert the archetypal women standing in for pure ideas by virtue of their full personhood. The women are direct and confrontational, implying a measure of equality between viewer and model – a corrective measure applied to the original imbalance of power created through the model’s societal proximity to prostitute. In Olympia and other figures of women, the painted woman is confronted by the viewer as a real woman despite her being otherwise signified as archetype. The question of the interaction between modernity, the feminine and domesticity is a problematic one in Armstrong’s analysis of the woman subject and woman artist. Armstrong addresses Morisot in two sections of her book; the first is through a detailed biographical reading of the tensions between Morisot, Eva Gonzalez (1849-1883) (the only student Manet ever took), and the two women’s interactions with Manet, where she primarily focuses on describing Morisot as uncomfortable with the attention and compliments given by Manet to Gonzalez.12 In a later section, Armstrong compares two works by Manet and Morisot: Manet’s The Railway, National Gallery of Art West Building (fig. 1) and Morisot’s On the Balcony, The Athaneum (fig. 2).13 Both paintings depict a mother and daughter looking out over an industrial scene. Armstrong acknowledges the dialogical relationship between the two painters and their responding works before ultimately claiming that “again [Manet] trumps Morisot, for 12 Armstrong, Manet Manette, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 68. 13 Carol Armstrong, Manet Manette, 203-6. Krogh 17 characteristically, Morisot was too concerned with fashion.”14 Armstrong categorizes On the Balcony as a “domesticating response,” due to the seeming psychological and formal unity between mother and child.15 Although Armstrong does not dismiss the painting, she does frame Morisot’s “domesticating” response as in opposition to Manet’s modern one. If Manet painted women as a site of modernity through his female subject’s direct confrontation of their role in the interplay of sex and capital, in the erosion of the lines between the public and private, how does this criticality change when it is a woman painting women, when her female subjects are engaged in activities and spaces coded female? Can this criticality exist without such direct confrontation, through indirect and ambiguous means? Édouard Manet and Morisot were close friends, engaged in the exchange of artistic ideas between 1868, when Henri Fantin-Latour introduced Manet to the Morisot sisters, and Manet’s untimely death in 1883.16 In 1874, after remaining convinced for most of her life that she would remain single, Morisot married Eugène Manet, Édouard’s brother. She gave birth to her only child, Julie Manet, in 1878. In her later scenes of maternity, when Morisot is a mother herself and painting her family, she is as Linda Nochlin points out, primarily acting not as a mother but as a painter – she is working and actively gazing into the scenes.17 The confronting gaze is not necessarily from the picture alone but within the triangulation between artist, picture, and viewer. The question of what qualifies then as speaking to modernity is a complex one, and I do not mean to offer a definitive answer here. Rather, following the recent work of other scholars, I 14 Armstrong, Manet Manette, 205. 15 Armstrong, Manet Manette, 203. “But where Morisot’s mother and child look in tandem at the same view, thus uniting them, Manet’s woman and child, one seen head-on from the front and the other from the rear in profil perdu, look in opposed directions, one out at us and the other away, with the result that it is much less clear what their relationship to one another is supposed to be, whether mother and daughter or governess and ward, or some other even less determinate arrangement, like that of two models unknown and unrelated to each other.” 16 Higonnet, Morisot: A Biography, 16. 17 Nochlin, “Wet Nurse,” 42. Krogh 18 seek to complicate what has long been a narrative where the masculine view and viewers form the basis of all argumentation. The long dominant narrative of modernity in nineteenth century France equates modernity to specific activities of leisure, signifiers of industrialization, spectacle, and the new culture of the street. In Furlong-Clancy’s view, and in mine, bourgeois women of the time period did leverage their gazes in specifically modern ways in this public arena, and that “particularly in the hybrid semi-private, semi-public world of the public park.”18 In art history, the idea of modernity has opened up to move towards a blurring of boundaries, where the public and the private are neither fully one nor the other, where the internal and external collide.19 Sex and class are not understood as separate spheres but intrude upon each other and between different stratifications of society. It is an awareness of time and temporality. In my view, modernity can be understood as an awareness of itself, as with Manet’s confronting gaze, and a breaking of a falsely constructed unity and safety. Being modern is being aware of the intrusions, the ambiguities, and the uncertainties of modernity. 18 Furlong-Clancy, The Depiction and Description of the Female Body, xxvi-xxvii 19 While I am drawing from a wide variety of readings and perspectives on modernity, I am most specifically referencing the work of TJ Clarke, Griselda Pollock, Charles Baudelaire, and Walter Benjamin in my approach to the question of modernity. Walter Benjamin was the first and continues to be the fullest discussion of issues of temporality, time and transience in the idea of modernity; for an extensive scholarly discussion on these topics, I recommend consulting the secondary literature on Walter Benjamin. In The Depiction and Description of the Female Body, Furlong-Clancy emphasizes the crossing over of public and private, including ideas of ambiguities, uncertainties, and the blurring of boundaries of modernity, and leverages scholarship on time and transience. The final synthesis of modernity as intrusions, ambiguities, and uncertainties is my own reading of such secondary literature. Krogh 19 Chapter 2: Painting Edma 2.1 The Cradle The Cradle, Musée d’Orsay, 1872 (fig. 3), depicts a woman resting her head in her hand while she gazes at an infant. The woman is Edma Pontillon, Berthe Morisot’s older sister who gave up her artistic pursuits for marriage and motherhood.20 In the painting, Edma’s infant quietly sleeps, touching her own hand to her head in a gesture mirroring that of the mother. Edma gently draws a translucent white fabric across the cradle, veiling the child from the viewer. Another white fabric, perhaps a bed-curtain, provides the background behind the pair. It is an intimate, closed domestic scene, tightly cropped on the figures of mother and child – yet at nearly two feet wide and a foot and a half tall, the painting’s spatial presence feels large for the darkness and intimacy of the scene. The painting was first exhibited in the 1874 First Impressionist exhibition, alongside a seascape by Morisot. The next year it travelled to London to exhibit there, but ultimately did not sell and remained within the family.21 The Cradle has yet to receive to receive a lengthy scholarly study, despite it being one of Morisot’s most famous works. When it has been written about, it has primarily been described as a tender image of maternal love and warmth. However, within the past few years, that view has begun to change. Furlong-Clancy reads the painting as “a radical acknowledgment of the challenge of caring for a newborn, rather than an uncomplex image of adoring maternity…this painting speaks of the demands on the new mother, no matter how full her heart, and how 20 Higonnet, Morisot’s Images of Women, 24. 21 Higonnet, Morisot’s Images of Women, 25. The painting was listed for sale at 800 francs at the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874; when it went to London, Durand-Ruel listed it for 1,500 francs. The painting subsequently went to the home of Edma Morisot. Krogh 20 fulfilled with regard to her new parenting role; a mother who was also expected to dress up, go out and please her husband.”22 In Sylvie Patry’s introduction to the recent 2018 Morisot catalogue, she characterizes The Cradle as expressing “the dilemma the sisters faced: the tension between a woman’s expected fate in the nineteenth century (marriage and motherhood) and an artistic career. [It] radiates a kind of melancholy; in fact, The Cradle can be seen as a modern reformulation of Dürer’s Melancolia I (fig. 4), with Edma—face resting on her hand, looking at her first child—reprising the attitude of Dürer’s figure.”23 These readings speak to the complex emotional resonance of the painting, going far beyond a simple idealizing portrait of motherhood. Erwin Panofsky famously wrote that Dürer’s image speaks not just to the emotion of melancholy, but is in fact both an allegory and self-portrait of the artist.24 In reading The Cradle as an allegory of melancholy and of motherhood, we can see the painting as both a self-portrait for Morisot and a reversal of a self-portrait; she is painting both herself and that which she is so pressingly not. Furthermore, the readings speak to how the mother’s social and emotional situation evokes external societal pressures and complex internal subjectivities. The inscription of societal pressures into the space of the maternal is born out through the careers and biographies of the two sisters. Growing up, Edma and Berthe took private painting classes at home from a variety of teachers, including Jean-Baptiste-Camille-Corot (1796-1875). (Their eldest sister, Yves, painted alongside the two for a little while but never pursued it beyond the level of a leisure activity.)25 Their parents built their daughters a studio in the garden of their 22 Furlong-Clancy, The Depiction and Description of the Female Body, 156. I find it telling that the painting also provokes a lengthy personal response from the writer; the work prompts her to discuss her own challenges in continuing in academia after the birth of her own child – a personal response I’ve found echoed in many conversations I’ve had about the work. 23 Patry, “Stimulating Ambiguities,” 28. 24 For further discussion, see Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Work of Albrecht Dürer, (Princeton, 1943), 155-157. 25 Higonnet, Morisot: A Biography, 22. Krogh 21 Paris house on Rue Franklin. However, Edma gave up painting after her marriage in 1869 to the naval officer Adolphe Pontillon, and never returned to their studio. Complex feelings towards motherhood and painting are reflected in letters between the two sisters after Edma’s marriage. On March 19, 1869 Berthe responds to Edma lamenting her lack of a current painting career. Berthe writes, “You cry on receiving my letters, and I did just the same thing this morning. … This painting, this work that you mourn for, is the cause of many griefs and many troubles. … Come now, the lot you have chosen is not the worst one. You have a serious attachment, and a man’s heart utterly devoted to you. Do not revile our fate. Remember that it is sad to be alone; despite anything that may be said or done, a woman has an immense need of affection. … This is something I see for you in motherhood. Do not grieve about painting.”26 A few months later that year, on August 13, 1869, Berthe expresses her own complex feelings towards the bind between motherhood and painting, when she writes, “I both lament and envy your fate. Bichette (her niece) helps me to understand maternal love; she comes onto my bed every morning and plays so sweetly...life gets more complicated by the day here and now I am gripped by the desire to have children, that’s all I need!”27 At the time of painting The Cradle, Morisot was, at the age of 30, unmarried and believed that she would remain so, despite the best efforts of her mother.28 Morisot’s inscribed presence as painter opposes her sister’s role of mother; each reminds the other of a role they have, at this time in their life, turned away from. Thus, there is a latent sense of melancholic longing – that of Edma for painting and Morisot for motherhood. 27 Unpublished extract from a letter from Berthe to Edma, august 13, 1869, in a private collection, quoted in Rey, Beautiful Painter, 29. 28 Higonnet, Berthe Morisot, 23. Krogh 22 Current scholarship regarding the experience of motherhood in 19th century France is generally focused on the subject through the lens of class. The historian Rachel Fuchs writes on the experience of nineteenth century French motherhood in her study Poor and Pregnant in Paris: Strategies for Survival in the Nineteenth Century. However, the work focuses primarily on poor motherhood, as most other available studies on the subject do. There is an unfortunate dearth of information on bourgeois childbirth. Furlong-Clancy, who also notes Fuch’s study and its class-based limited applicability, does discuss a likely, general bourgeois experience given the existing information and inferences gleaned from paintings. The birth in a bourgeois household as Furlong-Clancy notes, “generally occurred at home, meaning that the family was likely to be present within the apartment or house, and therefore all too aware of what the mother was going through.”29 After delivery, Furlong-Clancy writes that, “the mother was expected to return to ‘normal’ bourgeois femininity, to re-assume her various roles, with little time or inclination on society’s part to assess the impact of what had happened to her. A woman’s subjectivity, her humanity, and of course her creativity, were expected by nineteenth-century bourgeois society to be subsumed by the defining roles of wife, mother, and elegant supervisor of the order of the family home.”30 The ideal of the bourgeois woman was upheld as the pinnacle of good society. Still, as Furlong-Clancy writes, “The work of Morisot and Cassatt – who were painting from within the structure of those societal definitions – reveals the ways in which gender-restrictive tensions surface within private and public spaces, and the moments in which women seem to seek an escape, whether momentary or sustained, from that definition-by-female-roles of life- and care-giver, domestic organiser, decorative icon of her husband’s success.”31 Morisot may 29 Furlong-Clancy, The Depiction and Description of the Female Body in Nineteenth-Century French Art, 156. 30 Furlong-Clancy, The Depiction and Description of the Female Body in Nineteenth-Century French Art, 156-157. 31 Ibid. See footnote 32 for further citations. Krogh 23 superficially appear to represent the conventional gender expectations attached to constrictive class life of nineteenth century Paris, but closer analysis of her paintings reveals the subverting correspondence between conventional femininity and the woman as subject, one who experiences and makes visible the contemporary structures around her.32 When addressing the gaze of Edma in the painting, it is helpful to draw a comparison with a painting of Manet, Au Jardin (1870), private collection, (fig. 5), which depicts a seated woman in a park with a lounging man behind her and a baby towards the opposite side of the frame. In Furlong-Clancy’s extensive analysis of this painting, she writes that the mother “looks out at the viewer unflinchingly; receives our gaze, holds it, returns it. There is no sense of meek submission, ‘feminine’ modesty, bourgeois convention here. She occupies in physical and compositional terms the space of power on the canvas.”33 As Furlong-Clancy discusses, Manet’s mother in Au Jardin proclaims her subjectivity and presence through her direct gaze to the viewer. Manet’s bourgeois mother in Au Jardin is shocking for her hint of confident sexuality, ‘looking’ outwards like Olympia or the model in Dejeuner sur l’herbe, but otherwise coded in terms of dress and companions as occupying the social status of a full femme honnête.34 Her confident and measuring outlook hints at the sexuality underlying these codes, blurring in this case the line between the femme honnête and the fille publique. To quote Furlong-Clancy further, the mother “is not defined by her role as wife or mother – as would have been traditional and 32 Furlong-Clancy, The Depiction and Description of the Female Body in Nineteenth Century French Art, 161. 33 Furlong-Clancy, The Depiction and Description of the Female Body in Nineteenth Century French Art, xix-xx. Further discussions of Au Jardin, including comparisons to Olympia and Déjeuner sur l’herbe can be found at pp.xix-xx; pp. xxiv-xxvii; pp.xxxiii-xxxv; lxxi, pp.179-183; p.351; p.363, p.367. 34 Furlong-Clancy, The Depiction and Description of the Female Body in Nineteenth Century French Art, xxxiii-xxxv. Krogh 24 conventional in representational terms at the time – but by her physical presence as a woman in a garden; a fashionably dressed female body in a particular space, meeting the viewer’s gaze.”35 In The Cradle, however, the mother faces the baby. It is a feminine gaze in that it is directed towards a pursuit coded female and does not overtly break through the domestic space of the painting. Armstrong and others claim this gaze unifies and domesticates the scene, precluding it from the conditions of modernity found in other works. Indeed, the mother and child are at one and the same time unified and separated. The positions of the two subjects neatly mirror each other. Morisot places dabs of the same pink paint in the palm of the child’s hand and in the mother’s hand that cradles her own face. This rosy pink is also placed along the edge of the gauzy white curtain drawn around the cradle; it delineates the diagonal line drawn directly between the two figures, breaking the continuity of their gaze. While they may seem unified, this unification is questioned and made uncertain by the division. This division precipitates the inevitable divide between mother and child as time progresses, bringing instability and temporal awareness into the otherwise cohesive domestic scene. In contrast to Manet’s confrontational woman in Au Jardin, as Furlong-Clancy notes, a woman who “turns away from or refuses to engage with the viewer … displays an awareness” of what a met gaze might signal to such a viewer, whether the viewer is male or female.36 The simultaneous awareness of and refusal to engage with the evaluative gaze of the viewer makes visible the ever-present intrusion of the gaze. And the viewer’s gaze is intrusive, almost palpably so within the tight and intimate quarters of the cradle. The mother’s gaze is intense, consuming, 35 Ibid. 36 Furlong-Clancy, The Depiction and Description of the Female Body in Nineteenth-Century French Art, lxxxix. Additional discussions of this subject found at xxx-xxxi; pp.59, 102-103, 163 n. 156; 321-322; 351; 356, 359-362. Krogh 25 and in that intensity contrasts with the intrusive pressure of the viewer. This ‘turning away’ should not be read as passive submission. As Furlong-Clancy writes: “Female bodies effectively transgressed the binary logic of nineteenth-century Parisian society by subverting 'feminine' characteristics of submission and passivity. The controlling male gaze attempted to define the female bodies it viewed in public and to divide them into 'honest' and 'dishonest' categories but the inherent confusion of 'masculine' and 'feminine,' 'public' and 'private,' at this time encouraged women to resist the controlling male gaze as fashion journals and the growth of department stores increased the spectacularisation of the 'honest' female body. […] As a result, it was possible for women to be both spectacle (playing to the ruling male gaze) and director of their performance (choosing to return or resist the male gaze) in the public space.”37 While the room of The Cradle may not be a public space, its exhibition was – another fallen boundary between public and private. The ambiguity of Edma’s facial expression acts as a threshold of uncertain potentialities, unknown internalities and unknown externalities. Edma’s face is where Berthe’s line is most clear and precise. Her face stands out against the feathered brushwork of the rest of the painting, her half-closed eyes their own partial veil over the most expressive feature of the face. By the very ambiguity of its expression, the internal life of the subject is hidden and abstracted from us. The face does not signify specific emotions but oscillates between readings. In Giorgio Agamben’s essay “The Face” in Means without End, the author writes that "even the most noble and beautiful face is always suspended on the edge of an 37 Furlong-Clancy, The Depiction and Description of the Female Body in Nineteenth-Century French Art, 102-103. Krogh 26 abyss. This is precisely why the most delicate and graceful faces sometimes look as if they might suddenly decompose"38 He continues: "The human face reproduces the duality that constitutes it within its own structure, that is, the duality of proper and improper, of communication and communicability, of potentiality and act. The face is formed by a passive background on which the active expressive traits emerge.”39 According to Agamben, the face itself cannot signify specific internalities of the subject. Instead, it acts as threshold, neither fully internal nor fully external. What it reveals is not the subject’s underlying disclosure, but the capacity for the subject to disclose – thus, Edma’s subjectivity and her human potential for communication persists despite the claustrophobic pressures of the patriarchal society around her. Furthermore, there is another gazing face, unseen and yet known – that of Morisot the artist looking towards her subject. Her choice to invert the relationship to the pressures of gender in favor of participating within the artistic sphere, are both inscribed through her painterly gaze into this dark domestic interior. The painterly gaze doubles with Morisot’s identity as a bourgeois woman and sister offered privileged entry into the intimate domestic space. The space that seems to be secluded from the public, external world, is thus permeated by it. The ambiguities of gaze and space proclaim Morisot’s artistic subjectivity and reveal the conditions of modernity. 2.2 Woman and Child on a Balcony, The Athaneum (1872) Woman and Child on a Balcony (fig. 2) may not be a strictly maternal scene, but it is nonetheless essential to address in this section for its interplay between the domestic and public within the 38 Agamben, Giorgio. “The Face,” in Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000): 97. 39 Ibid. Krogh 27 subject matter of woman and child. Here, we have an image of Edma Pontillon and a child, most likely identified as Paule Gobillard (the daughter of Yves Gobillard and the eldest Morisot sister) painted in the same year as The Cradle.40 Now, we have Edma and child placed in an urban setting. Edma, dressed in black, leans on a balustrade, while a child in white with red-blonde hair looks down, through and past the railing, to a garden below mostly hidden from our view. The two figures are placed on a balcony overlooking the Champ-de-Mars and Trocadero.41 The Champs-de-Mars is a large public greenspace in the center of Paris, in the seventh arrondissement. (The Eiffel Tower is now at the northwest of the Champ-de-Mars, but at the time of painting it was still fifteen years away from the start of construction for the 1889 Expositions Universelles.) Here, the Champ-de-Mars looks empty; while we can discern more in the distance, the closer areas of the park seem empty and expansive. The broad city horizon in the distance—crowned by the gold dome of the Invalides, the strip of river framed by the balustrade, and the avenues of green in the park lead the eye off to the left of the painting, away from the woman and child and towards the distant city line. The woman and child thus appear at once crisply, immediately physically present and psychologically removed. In her introduction to Perspectives on Morisot, T.J. Edelstein writes, “the world of Berthe Morisot is often a world of boundaries… This sense of edges, of limitation, is imposed upon a visualization of ambivalence, which continues throughout her oeuvre.”42 While the collection is framed as a feminist reading of Morisot, Edelstein nevertheless lands on the side of reading these forms as confining borders and boundaries, not productive liminal sites of spatial and social ambivalence. As was noted, Carol Armstrong categorized this painting as a “domesticating” 40 Rey, Beautiful Painter, 60. 41 Ibid. 42 Edelstein, Perspectives on Morisot, 8. Krogh 28 response in Manet Manette. However, the geographic and formal positioning of the woman and child complicates how we read their occupation of space and relationship to each other and the artist. Instead of clearly occupying the public parks and their world of appraising gazes, the woman and child occupy an empty, private world in the midst of fashionable Paris. They are above the main promenade, leaning on a balustrade of a private balcony. Instead of the male gaze of the flaneur, the woman artist is the only gaze felt to intrude upon the scene. Doubling that seeming sphere of a private world is the fact that the artist is the woman’s sister and thje child’s aunt. Interestingly, this painting was not included in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, despite the presence of The Cradle and Hide and Seek (private collection), another Morisot painting featuring Edma and young children. 2.3 At Maurecourt: Hide and Seek, Under the Lilacs at Maurecourt and The Butterfly Chase Morisot painted Hide and Seek, 1873, private collection (fig. 6) during her first, short visit to the Pontillon family’s new home in Maurecourt.43 Maurecourt would also be the setting for three paintings Morisot painted of Edma and her children: in addition to Hide and Seek, in 1874 Morisot would paint Under the Lilacs at Maurecourt, private collection (fig. 7), and The Butterfly Chase, Musée d’Orsay (fig. 8). In the center of the composition of Hide and Seek, a young woman, Edma Pontillon, holds a green parasol and stands partially obscured by a tall bush with red flowers. To the left, there is a young girl with a large hat. They seem to be turning around the bush to chase one another. No one is truly hiding, and the painting gives the feel of 43 Adler, Correspondence, 89. Krogh 29 the hide-and-seek one plays with child too small to know if one cannot see them. Morisot has captured a moment of leisure, of play between a mother and her child, a moment already brimming with nostalgia from its first. However, there is an underlying sense of separation in the painting. As with The Cradle, the mother and child are formally separated, here by the shrub between them. The mother glances towards her child, but the child stands upright and till, looking off into the distance, neither towards her mother or the viewer. The child occupies the mother, but some other unknown entirely occupies the gaze of the child. This underlying sense of separation and melancholy will permeate the other paintings grouped here of Edma and her children engaged in leisure in the gardens. 1874 marked a major turning point in Morisot’s work and in her life. This was the year of the first Impressionist exhibition, the year her father died, the year she became engaged to and married Eugène Manet, and the year she was first met the poet Mallarmé, with whom she would develop a close friendship and artistic exchange.44 Morisot again stayed in Maurecourt with her sister Edma in the spring of that year, after the death of her father in January and before her engagement to Eugène Manet. She had just returned from a journey to Spain and a short stay at Petites Dalles in Fécamp.45 Under the Lilacs at Maurecourt, private collection, 1874, features Edma Pontillon seated underneath a lilac tree, engaged with a piece of embroidery. Edma’s black dress worn in mourning for her father functions as a dark center of the painting, setting off her white hat, the white embroidery, and the light dresses worn by her two daughters. The lilac tree reaches over them, casting the three figures into deeper shadow. Louise Cortambert, writing under the pen 44 Higonnet, Berthe Morisot, 114. 45 Adler and Garb, Correspondence, 93-94. Krogh 30 name ‘Madame Charlotte de la Tour,’ wrote on the symbolism of lilacs in Le langage des Fleurs, attributing the first emotions of love to purple lilacs, and youthful innocence to white ones. White lilacs may also have the attribute of death.46 In the foreground lie a discarded white parasol and straw hat with a blue ribbon. The light elsewhere in the garden and the accessories of leisure should convey a happy, light scene. However, again the interplay of gazes between the figures belies the emotional tone of the painting. One daughter kneels close to Edma, gazing closely at the same fabric absorbing her mother. The second daughter stands slightly farther apart, a small green border of grass cut through the center of the painting separating her from the other two. Her face is more of an impression, less readable, and she seems to be reaching towards the unified figures. The Butterfly Chase, 1874, epitomizes the interplay of melancholy and leisure in Morisot’s scenes of Edma and her children. Edma is in a white dress and black shawl around her shoulders. Behind her, one daughter is dressed in black and the other in white. Edma stands in the center of the painting, again framed by a canopy of lilac trees. She stands upright and still, with her body bisected by the diagonal line of the butterfly net she is holding. She looks slightly down and towards the ground, her face cast in shadow by the brim of her hat, shrouding her gaze. The net acts as a secondary veil and an instrument of arrested movement – the metaphor of catching butterflies. As with lilacs, butterflies operate symbolically between childhood innocence and death and mourning. One daughter in white, most likely Blanche, kneels down to investigate the grass, her back to the viewer. The daughter in the black dress, most likely Jeanne Pontillon, 46 Louise Cortambert, Le langage des Fleurs (Bruxelles: Société Belge de libraire, 1842), 19-20. Cortambert’s book on floriography was the first dictionary of its kind and popular in France particularly between 1810-1850. Kate Greenaway’s 1884 illustrated dictionary of floriography, published in English, similarly attributes first love and childhood innocence to lilacs, although with no mention of death symbolism. Krogh 31 stands behind her mother in a mirrored image.47 Instead of the white dress and black hat of Edma, she wears a black dress and white hat. Jeanne’s right arm is slightly raised and crooked, another mirror of Edma. We cannot see her face or gaze due to the impressionistic brushwork, but her simultaneous formal link and separation from Edma lends an ambiguous air of both leisure and sadness to the painting. In an extended article on Manet and impressionism, published in 1876, Mallarmé includes some paragraphs on the work of Morisot that speak to the simultaneous beauty and absence found in Morisot’s work. “Drawn more to rendering the appearance of things with marked economy of means, infusing them with the fresh charm of a feminine vision, Mlle. Berthe Morisot succeeds marvelously in capturing the intimate presence of a modern woman or child, in the quintessential atmosphere of a beach or grassy lawn.”… “The air of anxiety, the blasé quality, the private sorrows that generally mark scenes of contemporary life are nowhere more noticeable by their absence than here. We feel as if the charming woman and child are completely unaware that their pose, adopted unconsciously to satisfy an innate need for beauty, is being perpetuated in this charming watercolor.”48 Mallarme’s words are illuminating, if not unproblematic. He recognizes aspects of shared interest and sensibility between him and Morisot. As with other contemporary critics, Mallarmé retains a special focus on the beauty and charm of Morisot’s works compared to the other Impressionists working alongside her. Nevertheless, he reads the beauty and charm of her work 47 Patry, Morisot: Woman Impressionist, 142. 48 Mallarmé quoted by Rey in Beautiful Painter, 177. Krogh 32 as a necessary correspondent to the negotiation of the modern woman. Here, Morisot’s modern woman has an intimate presence, is unconscious or unaware of the charming and beautiful nature of their adopted pose, and has shed the “air of anxiety” that would otherwise be an inescapable and constant presence in modernity. In his view, Morisot captures the spirit of Impressionism while also exploring the poetic principles of interest to Mallarmé – the idea of absence, or lack, being the thing that inscribes what is missing. This is indeed what Mallarmé sees in Morisot, her inscription through absence that allows her to navigate the modernity of her work while still retaining a focus on the feminine. Again and again, Mallarmé repeats the word “charm” or “charming” when discussing Morisot’s work. The “charm” is posed as antithetical to the modern – the charming woman or child is unaware of an intruding gaze or the conditions of the public outside their charming, atmospheric world. So, for Mallarmé too, the charming domestic is in opposition to the modern. It is only with Morisot that this opposition takes on the quality of a conspicuous absence that points to the modernity pressing into the charming world. Mallarmé’s note regarding a woman’s “innate need for beauty,” elides how a woman’s posed—if seemingly unconscious—beauty inscribes society’s own requirement for a “natural,” feminine, and unconscious beauty as antidote to the artifice of the modern street. In all these works a latent sadness or remoteness underlies the otherwise joyful leisure time. Dominique Rey, when reading the Under the Lilacs at Maurecourt (private collection) and The Butterfly Chase (Musée d’Orsay), writes: “Beyond the seemingly joyous quality of the light, we often, in Berthe Morisot’s paintings, come across a sad gaze, a huddled child, a pose more melancholy than vivacious; and it is this combination of apparent joy and latent sadness that gives Krogh 33 her paintings their true value, as if, in certain works, a seemingly happy, harmonious existence was suffused with the Baudelairean concept of beauty as a phenomenon that only truly exists when some minor flaw underscores its glory. Her profound, reflective nature, her anxious character, the melancholy that scarcely left her throughout her life—glimpsed, at times, in a brief turn of phrase in a letter or notebook—also show through on occasion (in a diffident, allusive gaze, the involuntary projection of a pose) in Morisot’s canvas.”49 Again, we have the phenomenon of a major curator reading melancholy into the paintings Morisot creates of Edma with her children. In this quote, Rey attaches the discussion of Morisot’s personal melancholic character to the Baudelairean concept of beauty. The melancholy here connects to the boredom Morisot so frequently noted in her letters, such as when she writes to Edma, “I must say I am bored upwards of twenty times a day.”50As was discussed with The Cradle, the allegory of melancholy is the allegory of the artist and the artist’s self-portrait. The boredom and the melancholy are Morisot’s inscription of her own self onto the pictures of her sister with her children. The boredom Morisot insistently felt and noted drove her to seek refuge in the stimulation of painting.51 Painting was Morisot’s creative act and her answer to the underlying question posed by Edma’s family life. Morisot’s experience of boredom is a direct result of her experience of modern bourgeois domesticity and its constrictions on the bourgeois woman’s life. Thus, there is a link between Mallarmé and Baudelaire through Morisot’s experience and mediation of the domestic. In my interpretation of Mallarmé on Morisot, the 49 Rey, Beautiful Painter, 82. 50 Adler, Correspondence of Morisot, 47. 51 Higonnet, Berthe Morisot, 71. Krogh 34 “charming” scenes by Morisot inscribe modernity through modernity’s absence in the domestic sphere. In a Baudelairean interpretation, the domestic creates boredom through restricting access to the modern; however, this restriction creates the very thing of modernity itself—boredom.52 As Rey says, Morisot’s boredom and accompanying melancholy is the “flaw” in Morisot’s paintings that makes their charm and beauty interesting, or modern.53 The veiled boredom of Morisot’s figures allows her paintings to inscribe the modern in the domestic space, to oscillate between one sphere and the other. 52 See Walter Benjamin, “Convolute D: Boredom, Eternal Return” in The Arcades Project (Boston, MA: Belknap Press, 1982) and Benjamin, “The Storyteller (1936)” in Illuminations (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1968). Benjamin never strictly defines boredom, and at various times in his work it could refer to the ennui experienced by the fashionable denizens of Paris, or to an artistically and politically productive state of non-stimulation. 53 Rey, Beautiful Painter, 82. Krogh 35 Chapter 3: The Wet Nurse, Artist, and Mother: Maternal and Artistic Labor in Morisot’s Paintings of Wet Nurses Berthe Morisot married Eugène Manet in the December of 1874 and gave birth to Julie Manet two years later, on November 14, 1878. The two other Manet brothers, Édouard and Gustave, signed the birth certificate.54 Berthe’s health suffered following Julie’s birth. In late March of the next year, Morisot withdrew from participating in the fourth Impressionist exhibition of 1879. This is the same period of time where we first see Mary Cassatt mentioned in connection with Morisot.55 Cassatt had recently settled in France and the two women artists struck up a friendship. In addition to the obvious similarities regarding their circumstances of gender, class, and artistic circles, around this time they were both focusing their artistic explorations on the subjects of women’s daily experiences, women at their toilette, mothers and children.56 They may not have become especially close friends, but they exchanged frequent letters and visits.57 In March of 1879, Edgar Degas (1834-1917)—who was organizing the fourth Impressionist Exhibition—deputized Cassatt to visit Morisot and implore her to participate in the exhibition. Cassatt failed in this regard, most likely due to the problem of timing; the original date for the exhibition had been June, but now it was moved up to April.58 This would only be five months after Julie’s birth, and Morisot had had little time in the aftermath of pregnancy and birth to paint 54 Patry et. al, Berthe Morisot: Woman Impressionist, 198. 55 Higonnet, Berthe Morisot, 154. 56 Higonnet, Berthe Morisot, 154. 57 Mary Cassatt, Cassatt and Her Circle: Selected Letters, ed Nancy M. Mathews (New York: Abbeville Press, 1984), 149. 58 Higonnet, Berthe Morisot, 155. Krogh 36 more than some watercolor fans. (Although she frequently exhibited watercolor fans in addition to her oils, Morisot was reluctant to only be represented by her fans at the exhibition.)59 Morisot had most likely supported the fourth exhibition as an attendee, if not a participant. The fourth Impressionist exhibition was a success, with more than 15,400 visitors to the galleries at 28 avenue de l’Opera.60 The participants of that exhibition also made a financial profit of about 450 francs each.61 The next year, for the fifth Impressionist exhibition in 1880, Morisot had new work and was ready to participate, perhaps inspired by the success of the previous year’s exhibition. She exhibited ten oil paintings, comprising a variety of landscapes and scenes of women at their toilette.62 While Linda Nochlin writes that it was at the 1880 exhibition that Morisot exhibited her painting The Wet Nurse, private collection (fig. 9), the most recent scholarship indicates that Morisot’s painting of a maternal scene with her own child is only publicly exhibited in the sixth Impressionist exhibition in 1881.63 In fact, there are two paintings of Julie Manet with her wet nurse, and the chronology of both are is in dispute. One is in a private collection and is of 50 x 61cm and in oil on canvas, the other is in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek and is of 29 x 24 cm and also oil on canvas. Nochlin, writing only on The Wet Nurse in 1988, dates the painting to 1879, shortly after Julie’s birth and argues that Morisot most likely painted it in their garden when Julie was nursing.64 Anne Higonnet dates it to 1881, a significant period of time after Julie’s infancy and right before the sixth impressionist exhibition, held April 2 – May 1, 1881. The Clairet, Montalant, Rouart and 59 Higonnet, Berthe Morisot, 155. 60 Higonnet, Berthe Morisot, 157. 61 Ibid. 62 Patry, Morisot: Woman Impressionist, 221-222. 63 Nochlin, Wet Nurse, 238. 64 Nochlin, Wet Nurse, 237. Krogh 37 Coyner 1997 catalogue raisonné gives this and the second wet nurse painting, Julie and her Nurse, Angéle, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek (fig. 10), the year of 1880.65 The question of dates introduces a complex temporal aspect to these works. If they were indeed painted in 1880 or even 1881, there would then have to be a gap of nearly two years between Julie’s birth and the painting of these two works. In these works, Julie is clearly still a babe-in-arms, not a toddler of eighteen months or two years. This observation complicates how we read the “impression” of a painting noted for its ability to take impressionism to its extremes by Nochlin in her essay.66 What is the “moment” being captured here? Did Morisot paint the life she saw in front of her, or does the dissolving brushwork capture the dissolving edges of memory as well? If Impressionism is fascinated with the irreproducible moment in time, that single slice of modern life, as Clark argued, then the fleeting stages of infancy would be an especially apt subject.67 While infancy occurs in the spheres of the domestic and maternal, the Impressionist gaze upon this stage makes visible the quickly changing and irreproducible nature of a child growing. With the question of dates, there is the added layer of temporal ambiguity. In both paintings Julie looks to be approximately the same age, although perhaps the private collection painting shows a slightly smaller and younger looking Julie. Morisot gives the impression of the contemporary fleeting moment, but, if the wet nurse paintings were indeed painted in 1880, when Julie would have already been a toddler, that moment of infancy had already passed. 65 CMR Catalogue Raisonnée, 180. 66 Nochlin, “Wet Nurse,” 38. 67 Clark, The Painting of Modern Life, 3-22. Krogh 38 Morisot would be painting from memory.68 The main question of the wet nurse paintings, however, lies within their treatment of labour and subjectivity. Morisot was not unusual in hiring a wet nurse – in fact, it would have been shocking not to have done so. Wet nurses were a large industry in France, and one that supported the growth of the middle class and upper class economies in the 19th century.69 Urban artisans and shopkeepers sent their children out to the countryside to be nursed, which freed up the mothers of this socio-economic class to continue their own labor, so necessary for the smooth functioning of the life of their husbands and their business affairs. In 1874, the scale of problems within the industrie-nourricière regarding sanitation, infant mortality, and unpredictable financial arrangements were such that the government stepped in to create the “Loi Roussel” to supervise the industry throughout France.70 The aristocratic or upper-bourgeois family escaped this new field of regulations by hiring a nourrice-sur-lieu, or a live-in wet nurse.71 While Higonnet and Nochlin both identify the wet nurse represented in the two paintings as Angéle, and the name 68 It is difficult, if not impossible, to answer this with certainty from the existing scholarship. As mentioned, Morisot’s health had been greatly impacted by the birth of Julie, leaving her unable to prepare for the fourth Impressionist exhibition in 1879 (see Adler, Correspondence, 115). It is possible she completed a plein air study closer to the birth of Julie and completed it later, or that she painted from memory. On page 46, endnote 5 of her essay, Nochlin, “Wet Nurse,” speculates that the sketchy quality of the painting could be due to Morisot attempting to complete the work in a single nursing session, although she also notes that Morisot viewed the work as completed due to her publicly exhibiting the painting as a finished work. At this point, neither can be argued with certainty. 69 There is an unfortunate dearth of scholarship (and particularly recent scholarship) on the industry of wet nurses and upper-class motherhood in Paris at the time. Books on the subject include George Sussamn, Selling Mother’s Milk: The Wet-Nursing Business in France, 1715-1914 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982); Rachel Ginnis Fuchs, Poor and Pregnant in Paris: Strategies for Survival in the Nineteenth Century (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992); and especially Fanny Fay-Sallois, Les Nourrices à Paris au XIXe siècle (Paris: Payot, 1980). Fay-Sallois’ book is the only extensive investigation into wet nurses specifically in nineteenth century Paris. 70 Nochlin, “Wet Nurse,” 40. 71 Ibid. Krogh 39 Angéle is in the title of the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek painting, no published letters of Morisot mention an Angéle by name, or the employment of a wet nurse at all.72 During this time in Paris, there were a proliferation of private bureaus assisting bourgeois families in finding and employing wet nurses. Doctors at the time were recognizing the benefit posed to babies by breastmilk, but socially it was still seen as improper—even lewd—for a bourgeois woman to nurse a baby herself.73 Thus, wet nurses needed to be found, contracted and retained. These wet nurses were poor, rural women, often from the region of Morvan, who would come into the city, leaving behind their own families and still-young children in order to nurse the children of the wealthy Parisiennes.74 Fanny Fay-Sallois, in her 1980 study of wet nurses in nineteenth-century France, writes of the tragic contradiction created by this system of wet nurses: “Ce sont des paysannes pauvres qui, dès qu'elles sont retenues, doivent renvoyer leur propres enfant qu'elles avaient amené avec elles pour prouver la qualité de leur lait; il leur faut alors le sevrer rapidement et le confier à une ‘meneuse’ qui la ramènera au pays, où il sera nourri de bouillies et de soupes, souvent fatales pour sa vie. En revanche, les mères bourgeoises qui aiment de plus en plus voir grandir leurs bébés sous leurs yeux, mais qui, paradoxalement, répugnent toujours à les allaiter, disposent ainsi d’un lait jeune et de bonne qualité.”75 72 Nochlin, “Wet Nurse,” 38 and Higonnet, Berthe Morisot, 227. For published correspondence between the birth of Julie Manet in 1878 and until 1882, see Adler and Garb, Correspondence, 115-128. On multiple occasions Morisot mentions their maid, Pasie, by name, whom she also painted in the garden. However, the nurse is never mentioned, either by name or by profession. 73 Fanny Fay-Sallois, Les Nourrices à Paris, 12. 74 Fay-Sallois, Les Nourrices, 18. 75 Fay-Sallois, Les Nourrices, 116. “[The nurses] are poor peasants who, as soon as they are retained, must send back their own child whom they brought with them to prove the quality of their milk; he must be quickly weaned and entrusted to a ‘leader’ who will bring the baby back to the country, where he will be fed with porridges and soups, often fatally. On the other hand, middle-class mothers who love to see their babies grow in front of their eyes, Krogh 40 By virtue of this distribution of mother’s milk as capital, the bourgeois mothers were the ones whose children benefited from breastmilk, despite their reluctance to breastfeed their children themselves. They might love their children, love to watch them, and understand that breastmilk is beneficial or the child, but would not nurse their children.76 The rural wet nurses often brought their breastfeeding babies with them to the city in order to keep up the supply of milk. Once hired, the wet nurse would send her baby back home with another, to be fed a basic diet of porridge and soup. Thus, the domestic scene found in Morisot’s paintings inadvertently reveals an intrusion of capital into matters of life and death. There is a manufactured zero-sum game here; by feeding one child, another is not fed properly. While both children could ideally be fed, social expectations paired with the influence of the distribution of capital and the law to make it unseemly for one woman to feed her child, and unseemly for another woman to bring her own child with her while feeding the child of the first woman. The life of a wet nurse was closely watched and regulated by the bourgeois family during the eighteen months for which she would typically be employed. She would live in the house, often in the baby’s room. Because she was the only producer of milk, she would be kept under close watch by both the mother and the doctor. She would live a secluded life, only going out of the house for a daily walk in public gardens. On these walks she would nearly always be accompanied either by the bourgeois mother or another domestic servant.77 The constant surveillance was in part to ensure the wet nurse but who, paradoxically, are always reluctant to breastfeed them, have access to young and good-quality milk.” Translation my own. 76 Ibid. 77 Ibid. Krogh 41 had no sexual encounters (either generally or with the bourgeois husband) that would inhibit the flow of milk.78 The details we have of the close surveillance experienced by the wet nurses also give us clues to the general relationship between the bourgeois woman and her infant. While the women were expected not to nurse their children, they were not expected to be neglectful – by the standards of their own time and of today. Instead, they were expected to take a close interest in their children, personally supervising the nurses and participating in daily promenades through the public gardens. Although the honnête femme could not be seen participating in the bodily aspects of creating children (sex, pregnancy, nursing), maternal attention and love was expected and encouraged.79 The obvious question here is how enough women could be persuaded to fulfill the need for wet nurses for a growing population of wealthy Parisian women? In 1880, a wet nurse would make between 60-80 francs a month for a total of 1200-1800 francs for the total period of employment. She would additionally receive a number of gifts from the bourgeois family. At the time, a woman in her position would otherwise rarely make more than 18 francs a month.80 For an economically precarious rural woman, working as a wet nurse presented the opportunity to make in a relatively short period of time a far greater sum of money than she would ever make otherwise. When combined with 78 Many of these wet nurses had their own husbands, and all had recent enough sexual partners to have had their own baby. There was thus a significant and not unfounded worry that a romantic partner would liaise with the nurse, she would become pregnant, and there would no longer be enough milk. George Sussman, Selling Mother’s Milk, 110. 79 Pollock, Mary Cassatt, 121. 80 Fay-Sallois, Les nourrices, 164. Krogh 42 pressure from her family to send desperately needed money home, the choice was nearly made for her. The role of the wet nurse was instrumental in allowing Morisot to simultaneously inhabit the worlds of society woman, mother, and working artist. Again, Morisot was typical in hiring a wet nurse. Doing so allowed her to adhere to the norms of a proper bourgeois woman. We cannot, therefore, say that her artistic career was the main instigator in that decision. Still, the reality of the practice and the labour of the wet nurse allowed Morisot to continue working as a professional artist. She was able to work and paint with her arms free, all the while keeping Julie close to her. In depicting the wet nurse’s maternal labour, and in painting that labour, Morisot is in fact also painting her own labour as artist, made possible through the wet nurse. The subject of the painting then creeps past the borders of the canvas and includes Morisot herself – Morisot as artist, mother, and employer. Gardens were an integral setting to the life and work of a wet nurse. Wet nurses would frequently take their charges on daily walks through the public gardens of Paris, and bourgeois families would make special note of the use of their private garden both for nursing the child and for the wet nurse’s leisure when advertising to retain a wet nurse.81 The garden is thus a place for leisure and work for both women, undermining the typical dialectic between public spaces as sites of capital and private spaces as sites of leisure. 81 Fay-Sallois, Les nourrices, 76. Krogh 43 Furthermore, the garden setting in the private collection painting connects the work iconographically to scenes of Madonna and Child hortus conclusus, or in an enclosed garden. In James Snyder’s definition, the hortus conclusus consists of a small, enclosed garden symbolic of Mary’s purity and virginity, frequently with flowers symbolic of Mary.82 The painting further echoes a Madonna scene through the classic pyramidal composition of the wet nurse and Julie. However, as Furlong-Clancy notes, “the public park, styled as a haven for women and children, differed from the traditional protective space of the garden as site for the Virgin and the Madonna. The public park may have been enclosed by ornate gates but it was not a closed medieval garden and offered little or no protection for the 'honest' woman from the sexually interested gaze of the observer.”83 Furthermore, the reality of the economic and social situation of the wet nurse complicates this association. Although the wet nurse or nanny is “central to and ubiquitous in the park space, the nanny is also on the margins of bourgeois society, reduced to a type, a caricature, or a silhouette.”84 Far from virginal, the wet nurse is selected for her fecundity. However, after she is retained, the wet nurse finds a second sort of virginity; the strict surveillance of the bourgeois family enforces her chastity for the duration of her employment. Thus, the wet nurse is not only a seconde mére, she is a second Madonna, one created through the regulating forces of capital. Of the two paintings, the one in a private collection, Nochlin’s wet nurse, has garnered far more attention. In The Wet Nurse, private collection, Morisot’s gestural, painterly brushwork nearly dissolves the figure of the nurse into the garden of the 82 James Snyder, “Jan van Eyck and the Madonna of Chancellor Nicolas Rolin,” Oud Holland (vol. 82 no. 4, 1967), 166. 83 Furlong-Clancy, The Depiction and Description of the Female Body 81. 84 Furlong-Clancy, The Depiction and Description of the Female Body, 278. Krogh 44 background. The nurse and child nearly become one, with only the delicate outline of Julie’s head at the center anchoring the image and giving a small moment of clarity. Linda Nochlin connects this to Karl Marx’s phrase, “All that is solid melts into air.”85 She writes that: “[Morisot’s] strangle, fluid, unclassifiable, and contradiction-laden image Wet Nurse and Julie inscribes many of those characteristic features of modernism and modernity that Marx is of course referring to in his celebrated passage—above all, modernism’s profoundly deconstructive project. Sweeping away ‘all fixed and frozen relationships with their accompanying prejudices and opinions’—this is certainly Morisot’s project as well. And in some way too, she is in this picture, being forced to face, at the same time that it is impossible for her to fully face, the real condition of her life and her relations with a fellow woman.”86 For Nochlin then, the partial yet incomplete formal erasure of the wet nurse is essential to the painting’s inscription of modernity. Although we have no letters describing Morisot’s feelings regarding her wet nurse, the lack of such a letter suggests the lack of any conflicting feelings worth mentioning.87 However, regardless of stated intent, the painting, through its subject matter of a wet nurse caring for the painter’s own daughter, inscribes the exploitative economic relationship between the bourgeois woman and nurse that both removes the nurse from her own children and allows for the act of artistic 85 Nochlin, “Wet Nurse,” 41. 86 Ibid. 87 A significant number of Morisot’s letters have been published by Kathleen Adler, The Correspondence of Berthe Morisot (Columbia, SC: Camden Press), 1987. However, there are additional letters kept in private collections that remain unpublished. Krogh 45 creation by the artist. Formally, the dissolving brushwork binds the wet nurse to the garden scenery behind, making her and the garden a unified setting to frame the delicately outlined head of Julie. Morisot’s brushstrokes have the same short, rapid quality when describing both the garden and the nurse. The green of the garden foliage is restated in the face of the nurse, and the rosy pink of the nurse’s dress matches the pink of the flowers behind her. Again, regardless of intent, the formal qualities of the brushwork reveal the economically exploitative relationship between Morisot and the nurse that relegates the nurse to being both constantly present and never mentioned, never a part of letters that describe the new life Morisot has with Julie. The presence of the nurse is simultaneously unremarkable and invisible, but absolutely necessary for Morisot’s continued work as an artist and continued occupation of the sphere of the proper bourgeois woman. Morisot is describing the intrusion of relationships defined by capital into the private, domestic space of the garden and into her relationship with her daughter and her role as an artist. The lack of dissolving, gestural brushwork may be why the second wet nurse painting in Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek has received so little attention. The wet nurse is identified and humanized. Within the canvas, we have the clear features of Angéle’s face next to Julie’s. This juxtaposition poses a problem: the painting in 1880 may be less problematic in its emphasis on the presence of Angéle, but it reads as “un-modern” and more tender in its depiction of the two figures. In contrast to the private collection wet nurse, in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek painting, Angéle’s face in profile is delineated by a delicate line characteristic of Morisot’s treatment of faces. The painting humanizes Angéle in its specificity of her. Furthermore, unlike in the private collection painting Krogh 46 where the wet nurse seems to stare straight ahead, here Angéle looks directly towards Julie. The painting describes not just Angéle and Julie, but their relationship to each other. The relationship between the two figures is motherly, not anonymous. The modernity of the two wet nurse paintings lie not only in the deconstructive project and intrusion of capital into private life, but also here in the confronted complexities of those personal and economic relationships. Side by side, the two wet nurse paintings together redouble that complexity; taken together, Morisot’s two paintings both erase and humanize her wet nurse. Krogh 47 Chapter 4: Julie as a Young Girl with her Mother, Father, and Doll 4.1 Julie Manet and Her Father When Morisot married Eugène Manet on December 22, 1874, it was a quiet and somber affair because she was still in mourning for her father, who had passed away in January of that year. Morisot wore a street dress for the ceremony at the mairie and then in the church of Passy.88 Mme. Morisot moved out of the family apartment in the rue Guichard and went to Cambrai to stay with her daughter Yves, in order to allow the newly married couple to live there. In a letter describing her marriage to her brother Tiburce, Morisot writes: “As for myself, I have been married a month now; it’s strange, isn’t it? I went through that great ceremony without the least pomp, in a dress and a hat, like the old woman that I am, and without guests. Since then I have been awaiting developments, but up to now luck has not favoured us much. The trip to Constantinople, so definite, so certain at first, is no longer so. I must not complain, however, since I have found an honest and excellent man, who I think loves me sincerely. I am facing the realities of life after living for quite a long time in chimeras that did not give me much happiness – and yet, thinking of my mother, I wonder if I have really done my duty. All these questions are complicated, and it is not easy, for me at least, to distinguish clearly between right and the wrong.”89 Morisot hadn’t expected marriage to be her path in life, and in this letter she clearly remains conflicted. Here, and in many other letters, she expresses the love felt between her and Eugène 88 Adler, Correspondence, 95. 89 Letter to Tiburce dated January, 1875. Reproduced in and translated by Adler, Correspondence, 96. Krogh 48 Manet, but she still feels the pressure from her mother to conform to the expectations of motherhood placed on bourgeois women. The venture into marriage was new and uncertain, full of keenly felt complexities. Morisot would continue painting, and would continue to sign her unmarried name onto her future paintings.90 Morisot’s new husband would become the subject of one of her most well-known works, Eugène Manet at the Isle of Wight, 1875, Musée Marmottan Monet (fig. 14). In the late spring or early summer of that year, Eugène Manet and Morisot left France for a trip to England, where they visited Cowes, Ryde, and the Isle of Wight.91 The painting was exhibited in the second Impressionist exhibition in 1876 along with along many other works Morisot completed during their time in England. The painting shows Eugène Manet to the left of the canvas, perched on a black chair inside a cottage, looking out a window and onto a seascape. Much of the canvas is comprised by the window; sheer white curtains frame both the window and the edges of the painting and a windowsill with potted plants runs just above the bottom edge of the canvas. Past the window, a black wrought-iron fence comprising the central horizontal third of the canvas separates the cottage’s garden from the pathway and sea beyond it. Outside a little girl in turn looks out to the sea, her chaperone watching her. Painted in their first year of marriage and before Julie’s birth, the work provides an instrumental lens in understanding how Morisot positioned herself when painting the subject of her new husband and the figure of a young girl – a figure that, in light of Morisot’s recent Edma series, can be read as a general figure of a daughter. 90 Even after her marriage, critics would still write about her as “Mlle Morisot.” Her identity as an artist was so closely connected to her Morisot name that the critics kept the use of it. 91 Higonnet, Berthe Morisot, 140. Krogh 49 The interior and exterior spaces represented in the painting flow and fuse with one another, each one intruding into and permeating the other. The interior space of the dark cottage with room with Eugène is infused with the light of the world beyond. The visual threshold of the window articulated by the dark bars of the windowpanes, opens into a secondary spatial threshold of the garden and railing, articulated by the dark bars of the wrought iron fence. The threshold of the window itself is reiterate by the potted plants on the windowsill that anticipate the garden beyond. Beyond it, there is the dock or promenade on which the woman and child stand, and beyond that the horizon where the sea and the sky meet. Anne Higonnet writes, “Morisot places women in interiors next to frames of doors, hearths, windows, mirrors, and pictures. These borders act as signs of containment. They reiterate the enclosed character of the interior… Inner and outer spaces are defined as the opposites of each other.”92 As I have stated, however, the borders described by Morisot do not effectively contain the seemingly disparate realms of the interior and exterior. Instead, the borders and the closeness of Morisot’s figures to these borders and thresholds serves to infuse each area with the other. This is seen in the picture described here. The window acts as a second horizon line and frames both the woman and child and the seascape as an image for observation by both Eugène within the painting and Morisot outside it. Morisot painted this work one year before Louis-Émile-Edmond Duranty would write on the window in modern art in his essay “The New Painting” (1876): “From indoors we communicate with the outside world through windows. A window is yet another frame that is continually with us during the time we spend at home, and that time is considerable. … The window frames the scene outside in the most 92 Higonnet, Berthe Morisot: Images of Women, 72. Krogh 50 unexpected and changeable ways.”93 Unlike Baudelaire, Duranty located French modernity not only in the street but also in the home, saying, “our lives take place in rooms and on streets.”94 Morisot uses the window as a threshold that holds both the room and the street through the movement of a triangulation of looking. Eugène holds a pair of binoculars in his hand, but those have fallen away. Instead he looks directly out, the line of the profile of his face continuing the line of the curtain behind him. The chaperone’s face seems oriented towards the girl, but the horizontal black line of the window frame blocks our view. The young girl is positioned near to the center of the painting, framed by the window and balcony. She seems the most free and unencumbered, looking out onto the ships in the water – vehicles of trade and travel. However, our own gazes do not find their way to her until they’ve traversed through the multiple thresholds and the gazes of the adult figures. Morisot would continue her exploration of Eugène Manet and a daughter figure after Julie’s birth. She would paint three works featuring the two, always in a garden and absorbed in activity. These would all be painted in Bougival, a suburb to the west of Paris where the family would spend four summer holidays in a house by the Seine. Like the wet nurse paintings, the father-and-daughter motif is an unusual, if not unique, subject for Impressionist painting. Traditionally the garden was a site for painting women at leisure and in Morisot’s work, for painting the wet nurse and child. In the Bougival paintings, Morisot reverses this by depicting Eugène in the garden. The first of these paintings was completed in 1881, titled Eugène Manet and His Daughter at Bougival, Musée Marmottan Monet (fig. 15). In it, Eugène Manet sits on a garden 93 Louis-Émile-Edmond Duranty, The New Painting 1876, 26. 94 Ibid. Krogh 51 bench with his hands thrust into his pockets. Julie stands next to him, playing with a toy model of a town balanced on his lap. Distantly, through the flowering garden we see the gate, fencing off this scene from the outside, public world. The image is unified and tender. The seems to be no visible hint at the modern world outside them. However, the fact that Morisot is painting a man engaged in domestic, leisurely play with his young daughter gives the painting a radical undertone. Manet is looking to Julie who is looking to her play. But there is, beyond the edges of the canvas, Morisot looking to Manet. It is his engagement with his daughter that facilitates her work. This is a clear reversal of the typical arrangement of a male artist painting a woman playing with a child. By virtue of the subject matter, we are as viewers acutely aware that it is a woman—it is the mother—painting the father and daughter. Thus, Morisot presents herself as both artist and mother, simultaneously engaged in the modern domestic and in modern painting. The 1883 painting of Eugène and Julie in Bougival, titled Julie and Eugène Manet, private collection (fig. 16), depicts a scene from the second of four summer holidays the family spent by the Seine, in a house with a garden nearly overgrown with flowers – roses and clematis, irises and peonies.95 Eugène and Julie are situated in the foreground, detached from clear spatial points of reference, save for a garden fence separating the pair from the background. While Eugène looks up to meet our gaze, Julie is turned away, entranced in her occupation and an inscrutable enigma to the viewer. As was often with Morisot’s paintings around this time, the corners of the canvas are left partially (or entirely) unpainted, with the brushwork loosening as it approaches the edge of the canvas. The loose brushwork further dissolves the spatial referent around Eugène and Julie. Instead of the figures relying on spatial signifiers to ground them, the 95 Rey, Beautiful Painter, 104. Krogh 52 figures save the surrounding space from abstraction. The garden space formally and socially thus becomes a function of the figures of Eugène and Julie. In 1886 Morisot painted another version of Eugène Manet and Julie in the garden. In The Lesson in the Garden, private collection (fig. 17), the two are seated close together on a bench, both wearing wide brimmed hats and seemingly engaged in conversation. The surrounding greens and browns with bright touches of flowers swirl around the two figures. The brushwork is full of dynamic energy and rapid strokes. The garden was a site of increasing painterly freedom for Morisot, where her brushwork bordered ever closer to abstraction. The figures are inscrutable. In that absence of delineated faces or expressions, the gaze and the perspective of the artist steps in to inscribe itself. As with the Wet Nurse, Morisot’s gestural, abstracting brushwork inscribes her presence into the scene she is witness to. A quiet moment between father and daughter is permeated by her artist’s gaze. 4.2 Mother, Daughter, Doll: Referred Motherhood in Paintings of Julie with Her Doll As Julie Manet matured, Morisot would paint a series of works featuring her daughter and her doll.96 In these works, Morisot explores her own role as mother and artist through the referred relationship of motherhood found between Julie and the doll. In Julie and Doll, 1884, private collection (fig. 11), a blond Julie Manet, dressed in a green dress, holds a miniature recreation of herself. The doll has almost the same shade of hair, the same emerald green eyes, and the same rosy pink cheeks – even if the doll’s cheeks are more precisely painted on, causing doll’s artifice 96 The doll in these paintings is always blonde and approximately the same size. However, I have found no scholarly confirmation that it is definitely the same doll in all paintings. Krogh 53 and cosmetics to contrast with the still natural and unselfconscious face of a young girl. Julie gazes off to the lower corner of the painting, below and past where a viewer might stand, caught in a reverie. Her green eyes are flat and opaque. She seems either unaware or unconcerned of the watchful gaze of the painter, her mother, or of a future and unknown viewer. In contrast, Julie’s doll acts as a second and more public self. The doll is the one who meets the viewer’s gaze. Julie may seem unconscious of the viewer—and thus of society’s measuring gaze—but the doll’s presence indicates otherwise, that Julie’s lack of concern is its own temporary façade. The doll therefore can be said to act temporally as a threshold; just as Julie is Morisot’s daughter, echoing Morisot’s past childhood and her future womanhood, the doll indicates Julie’s future as a grown young woman, aware of and navigating the social expectations and gazes around her. Julie may appear innocent of this future social world, but Morisot as artist and mother is not unaware. The doll, as Julie’s own child, is also Julie’s future, grown self. Dolls have long been read as a way for young girls to practice motherhood. 97 Fashion, modernity and the doll are deeply intertwined. Baudelaire, in his essay “The Philosophy of Toys” connects toys—and dolls—to the formation of the subject and the introduction of children into society. In his perspective, toys initiate children into the public social world; they are one of the very first pieces of culture that children learn to negotiate. In the child’s hands, toys become “actors in the great drama of life” and are children’s first introduction 97 Furlong-Clancy speaks to this reading when speaking to another painting of girls and dolls – Renoir’s La Promenade. She writes, “The doll of course is a commodity, a representation of stereotypical ‘femininity,’ which allows the young girl to rehearse her future maternal role, and which here lies passive and inert while echoing the vivid physicality of each of the girls.” See Furlong-Clancy, The Depiction and Description of the Female Body, 303-306. Krogh 54 to art.98 In addition to the toy or doll, the toy shop itself functions as a public reiteration of the private space of the bourgeois apartment. Regarding the toy shop, Baudelaire writes, “I have moreover retained a lasting and a reasoned admiration for that strange statuary art which, with its lustrous neatness, its blinding flashes of colour, its violence in gesture and decision of contour, represents so well childhood’s ideas about beauty. There is an extraordinary gaiety in a great toyshop which makes it preferable to a fine bourgeois apartment. Is not the whole of life to be found there in miniature - and far more highly coloured, sparkling and polished than real life?”99 The toyshop restates the material conditions of the private bourgeois apartment, but makes it miniature, bright, and easy to consume. It is made to be looked over and purchased—a space for children to act out the gaze of the flaneur. Only, instead of observing the street, one is in the public space of a shop, observing replicas of private spaces. While Baudelaire’s essay explores the child’s destructive impulse towards the toy, his analysis of this impulse hinges on the function of the toy as imperfect simulator of life; when a child is young, there is an irresistibly seductive spark of imaginary life in a thing. When a child is older the spark disappears, and the destructive impulse ensues.100 The toy is the most vivid initiation a child has into the social world, but it is always incomplete and temporary. In addition to Baudelaire’s analysis of toys more generally, the doll is specifically coded towards social presentations of femininity. The doll both signifies women’s artifice and the 98 Baudelaire, “A Philosophy of Toys,” The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays (London: Phaidon, 1995), 200. 99 Baudelaire, “A Philosophy of Toys,” 198. 100 Baudelaire, “A Philosophy of Toys,” 202. Krogh 55 fleeting fashions of modernity, while also signifying childhood, innocence, and the fleeting time of a girl child unaware of the artifices of womanhood. Through the doll, the modern intrudes in the realm of childhood, and the realm of childhood resists the same bracketing so often applied to the domestic as separate and other to society.101 A second work completed two years later, Cottage Interior or Little Girl with a Doll, 1886, Musée d’Ixelles, (fig. 12), combines still-life, landscape, and genre scene.102 In this painting, Julie, wearing a dress of white and blue, stands in front of a cottage window, holding her doll. Julie is in profile, looking towards her doll. The doll is the one gazing out the window and to the garden and seascape below. The viewer’s gaze is thus directed first to Julie and then the doll, who mediates and directs both the viewer’s and Julie’s access to the public world past the window. In the foreground, a circular white table holds a pitcher, bread, and a cup. Instead of acting as a picture-within-a-picture, the framed view through the window visualizes the complex relationality between the two spatial spheres. The rectangle window frames a seascape, contrasting with the interior still-life framed by a round table. Cottage Interior loosens and blurs the spatial lines between Morisot’s 1875 painting of Eugène Manet in the Isle of Wight, Musée Marmottan Monet (fig. 14) another English vacation window scene and one to which I will return later. In Cottage Interior, Eugène Manet is replaced by the figure of Julie. In Isle of Wight, Manet’s gaze out the window and towards the external world is the focal point of the piece; while his position indoors reverses normal gender conventions, his gaze is unidirectional. By contrast, in Cottage Interior, Julie acts as a fulcrum between the interior and exterior, where both 101 For further information on dolls, fashion and modernity, see Juliette Peers, “Adelaid Huret and the Nineteenth Century French Fashion Doll: Constructing Dolls/Constructing the Modern,” in Forman-Brunell and Whitney 2015, 157-83. 102 Multiple scholars have made this observation over the years. See Cindy Kang, “Morisot on the Threshold,” 136 and Marianne Matthieu, Berthe Morisot, 172. Krogh 56 permeate each other. Julie’s presence remains the question of the painting, but her face remains unseen—we only see the focus of her gaze. Instead of gazing out to the exterior world, Julie physically occupies the liminal space between domestic and exterior but gazes at her doll – Julie’s surrogate for Julie’s role in Morisot’s gaze. While Morisot develops and explores her role as woman, artist, and subject in relation to her daughter, Julie explores her own developing subjectivity through the repoussoir of her doll. Thus, the artist is in the midst of observing both Julie and herself developing their own subjective interiorities, caught between one space and another. The greys and whites painted of Cottage Interior recall two earlier works by Morisot, Psyché, 1876, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, and Young Woman at Her Toilet, 1875-76, Art Institute of Chicago, both noted by Zola in 1877 for their use of grey and white: “The Psyché and Young Woman at Her Toilet are two veritable pearls, in which the grays and whites of the fabrics play a most delicate symphony.”103 In all three of these paintings, Morisot adeptly uses a gestural and painterly style with her greys and whites to navigate a young woman on a threshold – one who, at the time of the painting, occupies the domestic sphere, but is readying herself to step outside private quarters. This preparation takes the form of looking, and looking in order to navigate a liminal space of the subject. The greys and whites formally link the motif of a woman currently in the domestic sphere, seemingly unaware of any current gaze directed towards her, but who is nevertheless on the verge of stepping into the public space of gazes. In the earlier two paintings, fashionable women look through either the glass of the mirror or the glass of the window in order to know themselves as modern, fashionable subjects. Cindy Kang argues that Morisot’s “window scenes featuring Julie and other young girls in these in-between spaces are 103 Quoted in Rey, “Writers in Morisot’s Circle,” 177. Krogh 57 arguably the most poignant and salient expressions of the analogy between subject and artist. Julie, in Cottage Interior, is suspended in the same space of possibility and vulnerability as her mother was in the act of painting her.”104 This elides the secondary threshold of the doll, held by Julie in the liminal space of the window. Julie, while caught in a window, looks to the doll—an instrument of fashion, the domestic, and surrogate subject. Kang argues, and I agree, that here the figure of a young girl at the window “allegorizes” the artist. Another painting worth a brief mention here: Doll on the Veranda,1884, private collection (fig. 13), blurs boundaries between still-life, landscape, and even has something of the portrait to it. A still-life comprised of a tea pot, cups, and a flower pot sits on a square wooden table. Behind the table, a wooden vertical post divides a landscape filled with trees and two partially obscured cottages into two unequal halves. A doll sits in strict profile on a simple chair, looking towards the (too large for her) tea set. Notably, the doll is painted here without Julie – the doll is simply by herself, making it both an object and a human stand-in. There is a gap between the doll and the table that separates the two both formally and psychologically. Instead of the doll and tea appearing to be unified in one plane separate from the surrounding landscape, the quick and gestural brushwork flattens the doll, still-life, and landscape – all appear to float on the same surface level of the canvas. The doll as inscrutable vessel for the absent women floats as well, floating between object and subject, domestic toy and instrument of modern fashion. 4.3 Self-Portrait as Artist and Mother: Berthe Morisot with Julie Manet 104 Kang, “Morisot on the Threshold: Windows, Balconies, and Verandas,” 136. Krogh 58 Berthe Morisot began painting self-portraits only in 1885. She painted two self-portraits in oils that year, one with Julie Manet, and the other with Morisot holding an artist’s palette. Marni Kessler argues that Morisot’s self-portraits are her deliberate attempt to represent herself as both artist and mother, and in doing so respond to Manet’s earlier portraits showcasing Morisot as a fashionable, visually striking woman caught within the thresholds between public and private life in Paris.105 Instead, Morisot’s own self portraits function as a space for creating, constructing, and navigating her own subjectivity. In her self-portraits, Morisot presents an image of herself not overly concerned with beauty and femininity for herself. Instead, she is more concerned with her self-presentation as artist and mother, a middle-aged woman striking in her complexity. Morisot blurred boundaries between the interior and exterior and the masculine and feminine-coded expectations for artists in her own studio. When Morisot had her own residence built in the Rue de Villejust (now Rue Paul Valéry) in 1881 she did not build a separate, detached space for her studio, as was the typical choice.106 Nor did she continue to paint in her drawing room. Morisot placed her one-and-a-half floor studio space in the center of her home, in the heart of her domestic sphere, but separated as a purely dedicated studio. This is in contrast to the typical practice by professional male artists of building a studio as a separate space on the top floor.107 This is also in contrast to amateur female artists who would paint and draw in the living spaces of their home.108 The floor plans for the rue de Villejust residence label “Artist’s 105 Kessler, “Unmasking Manet’s Morisot,” 486. Manet had passed away on April 30, 1883. 106 Addler, “The Suburban, the Modern and ‘une Dame de Passy’” (The Oxford Art Journal, 1989), 7. 107 Kang, “Morisot on the Threshold” Berthe Morisot: Woman Impressionist, 137. 108 Ibid. Krogh 59 residence” and “studio” on the ground floor, as opposed to “studio-drawing room” (Atelier-salon) that would be found for an amateur woman artist’s residence.109 As Michael Fried suggested in his book Manet’s Modernism, Or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s, artists from the 1860s onwards painted self-portraits as the images they saw in the mirror, no longer correcting the mirror’s effect of reversing their image.110 An artist’s features would be reversed from what someone else would see, and instead would show the viewer how the artist saw themselves – always mediated by another visual threshold and always in two dimensions. In the Self-Portrait with Palette, Musée Marmottan Monet, 1885 (fig. 18), Morisot indicates this mirrored reversal through the flowers on her lapel.111 (The flowers were remarked upon for their visual proximity to military medallions, a masculine symbol, while also acting as symbols of femininity.) Morisot adheres to the trend of artist’s painting their image found in the mirror, and fully positions herself as an artist. Within Morisot’s signatures style of dematerializing, gestural brushwork, the artist’s palette anchors her figure to the canvas. Morisot painted another self-portrait in 1885, Portrait of Berthe Morisot and Her Daughter, private collection (fig. 19). In her Self-Portrait with Julie Manet, Julie Manet acts as an anchor for Morisot instead of the palette. Socially, and Kessler points out, Julie’s presence “reconcile[s] her art with certain cultural imperatives” of the bourgeois woman.112 Furthermore, the flower in Morisot’s lapel is reversed from the Self-portrait with Palette, indicating she has 109 Kang, “Morisot on the Threshold,” 138. 110 Fried, Manet’s Modernism 395-96. 111 Matthieu, Berthe Morisot, 156-7. 112 Kessler, Manet’s Morisot, 486. Krogh 60 painted herself with the orientation found in life.113 With Julie in the composition, Morisot’s self-portrait presents her face how others, and not the mirror, would see it. However, the composition of the portrait complicates the social roles implicit and explicit in the painting. Morisot stands with a confidence and apparent physicality that grounds her in the center of the painting. She looks directly ahead into the space of the viewer. She does not look toward Julie, who is positioned slightly behind Morisot. If Morisot appears as a vividly physical presence, Julie is ethereal and nearly undefined. Julie is rendered more impressionistically, and white paint extends from Julie and into the divide between them. White paint again marks where Julie’s hand seems to touch Morisot’s arm. Morisot expressed an interest in the delicacy and expressive potential of Japanese art, writing in her notebook about the ability of Japanese line drawings to “indicate a mouth, eyes and nose with a single stroke of the brush.”114 Morisot’s own face is painted with delicate but clear lines, whereas Julie’s is all in white paint and canvas. This presentation of the two figures then contains a notable absence. The tenderness and attention evident in so many of Morisot’s paintings of Julie does not appear to be in this painting of the two of them together. This is a reversal of previous positioning; in Julie and Her Nurse and Eugène Manet and His Daughter at Bougival, the adults are turned to face Julie, directing the viewer’s attention to the child facing frontally towards the viewer. In this self-portrait, it is Julie’s turn to direct attention to the frontally posed Morisot. She is oriented towards her mother in a way she is never oriented towards other adult caretakers. Thus, while centering herself and her profession, Morisot still reveals the close bond between mother and daughter. 113 Matthieu, Berthe Morisot, 157. 114 Mathieu, Berthe Morisot, 158. Quoted from Morisot’s green notebook, currently at the Musée Marmottan Monet archives. Krogh 61 Morisot painted another portrait of her with her daughter in 1887, Portrait of Berthe Morisot and her Daughter at a Window, private collection (fig. 20). The 1887 self-portrait with Julie is similarly diffuse in its depiction of Julie next to Morisot. Morisot, seated in a black dress on a fashionable couch, looks off to the bottom right of the painting with an apparent expression of interest. Julie stands behind her, hands holding the arms of the couch to orient herself to her mother. Her face is left entirely blank – although this is a study and we cannot know the detail with which Morisot planned to paint Julie’s face, the discrepancy in detail between the faces of Morisot and Julie is striking, repeating and amplifying the theme of the previous portrait. Another detail the study leaves off is the window indicated by the title. The presence of a window would simultaneously act as threshold and painting-within-a-painting, bringing the outside world and Morisot’s public life as painter into the domestic space inhabited by her and Julie. Morisot would paint no more self-portraits after the 1887 portrait with Julie. In 1889, however, we do have a drypoint etching of Morisot with her daughter, titled The Drawing Lesson (Berthe Morisot Drawing with her Daughter), private collection (fig. 21). The drypoint show Morisot seated on a couch, engaged in a drawing, staring directly into the space of the viewer. Julie Manet leans on the arm of the sofa to look onto her mother’s sketch. Clearly, it is not a very formal artistic lesson. Julie is older here, and more clearly defined as her own physical, dynamic presence within the image. Still, Morisot’s face is darker, more clearly defined and shadowed in comparison to Julie’s. My research indicates that Julie’s placement in these self-portraits emphasizes Morisot as a fully formed woman, both a mother and an artist. Julie’s portrayal as young and dependent on the figure of the mother in these compositions signals her still coming-into-being as her own Krogh 62 subject, still a girl in society and not yet a woman. Morisot, in contrast, is steady in her conception of self and the place she occupies socially from the beginning, contrary to what much of the secondary literature says. In these three self-portraits she is confident in that modern ambiguity, occupying both domestic-maternal spheres and public-artistic spheres at once. In her own self-portraiture, Morisot combines motherhood and being an artist in one subject. She contains within her image of herself the dialectic between these two roles that has permeated her paintings of Edma, her wet nurse, and Julie with her father and her doll. In her self-portraits with Julie, there is no longer an external referent mediating the relations and ambiguities of Morisot’s roles. Years after Julie’s birth, Morisot paints those complex simultaneities within her self-portrait, a genre perhaps chosen for the purpose of depicting this very complexity of subjectivity between mother and daughter. Krogh 63 Bibliography Adler, Kathleen and T. J. Edelstein. Art Museum. "Perspectives on Morisot." Hudson Hills Press, 1990. Adler, Kathleen. "The Suburban, the Modern and 'une Dame De Passy'." Oxford Art Journal 12, no. 1 (1989): 3-13. Agamben, Giorgio. “The Face,” in Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000): 90-9. Armstrong, Carol M. Manet Manette. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. Baudelaire, Charles and Francis Scarfe. Baudelaire: The Complete Verse. London: Anvil Press Poetry, 1986. Berson, Ruth. The New Painting: Impressionism 1874-1886. San Francisco, CA: Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, 1996. Bonnet, Marie-Jo. “Femmes Peintre À Leur Travail: De L’autoportrait Comme Manifeste Politique (XVIIIe-XIXe Siècles).” Revue D’histoire Moderne et Contemporaine 49, no. 3. (2002): 140-67. Clark, T. J. The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers. Rev. ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. Clark, T. J. "Freud's Cézanne." Representations, no. 52 (1995): 94-122. Clayson, Hollis and André Dombrowski. Is Paris Still the Capital of the Nineteenth Century: Essays on Art and Modernity, 1850-1900. Burlington: Ashgate, 2016. Crary, Jonathan. 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Myers, Sylvie Patry, Bill Scott, Damion Searls, et al. Berthe Morisot: Woman Impressionist. Dallas, TX; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Québec, Canada; New York, NY: Rizzoli Electa, 2018. Kessler, Marni Reva. "Reconstructing Relationships: Berthe Morisot's Edma Series." Woman's Art Journal 12, no. 1 (1991): 24-28. Kessler, Marni Reva. “Unmasking Manet’s Morisot.” The Art Bulletin 81, no 3 (September 1999): 473-89. Madeline, Laurence, Bridget Alsdorf, Jane R. Becker, Joëlle Bolloch, Vibeke Waallann Hansen, and Richard Kendall. Women Artists in Paris, 1850-1900. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. Mallarmé, Stéphane, Berthe Morisot, Olivier Daulte, and Manuel Dupertuis. Mallarmé-Morisot: Correspondance 1876-1895. Lausanne: La bibliothèque des arts, 2009. Manet, Julie. Growing Up with the Impressionists: The Diary of Julie Manet. Edited by Jane Roberts. London: I.B. Tauris, 2017. Mathieu, Marianne. Berthe Morisot, 1841-1895. Paris: Éditions Hazan, 2012. Krogh 65 Meyers, Jeffrey. Impressionist Quartet: The Intimate Genius of Manet and Morisot, Degas and Cassatt. Orlando: Harcourt, 2005. Morisot, Berthe. Berthe Morisot: The Correspondence with Her Family and Friends. Edited by Denis Rouart. Translated by Betty W. Hubbard. London: Lund Humphries, 1957. Nochlin, Linda. “Morisot’s Wet Nurse: The Construction of Work and Leisure in Impressionist Painting” in Women, Art, and Power: And Other Essays, 37-56. 1st ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1988. Panofsky, Erwin. The Life and Times of Albrecht Dürer. Princeton, 1943. Pollock, Griselda. Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism, and Histories of Art. London; New York; Routledge, 1988. Pollock, Griselda. Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art's Histories. London; New York: Routledge, 1999. Rapaport, Herman. Is there Truth in Art? Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. Rubin, James H. Manet: Initial M, Hand and Eye. Paris: Flammarion, 2010. Shennan, Margaret. 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Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Art History
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Birthing the modern : modernity, maternity, and subjectivity in the art of Berthe Morisot
Text