Women of the French Impressionist Movement

The "First Ladies" of the French Impressionist movement were undeniably the Frenchwoman Berthe Morisot (1841-95) and the American expatriate Mary Cassatt (1944-1926). They were also, by reason of default, the "second," "third" and "fourth"-tiered women of Impressionism as well - for there were no other female Impressionists of note, despite the fact that one or two other women had associations and hangings with the movement's acknowledged inner-circle of males: Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919), Claude Monet (1840-1926), Camille Pisarro (1830-1903), Edgar Degas (1834-1917) and (by others' judgement if not his own) Edouard Manet (1832-83) (Read 229). By default or not, Morisot and - to a much larger degree - Cassatt stand firmly in the midst of that company of gentlemen because they were good at their art, not by any condescension on the part of either critics or compatriots - or contemporary "inclusionist" sentiment. Indeed, both enjoyed more commercial success in their lifetimes than such Impressionists as Sisley and Pisarro, both of whom suffered the classic artist's fate of being "discovered" by the commercial interests of the art world after their deaths. The Impressionist movement, as is common knowledge, led the way into a 20th Century art milieu in which revolution and experimentation have become as much the standard today as classicism and re-creation were one hundred and twenty years ago. Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot, who would have been denied a place in t

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anet - and the Impressionists who followed his lead - did not concentrate upon "classical" subjects, but chose contemporary faces and settings. (Oddly enough, although the Impressionists went even further in this direction, Manet himself tended to favor classically-oriented themes - though he put them in contemporary settings. What his contemporary critics failed to note was that the Renaissance "classic" models they so admired did exactly the same: hence a Raphael "School of Athens" featured several of his contemporaries and references to same, albeit set in "classical" Greece (Strickland 38).) The Impressionists were not so much trying to overturn classical art as they were attempting to justify painting itself in the face of a new technological development of the 19th Century: photography. The "moment of realism" that photography captured, they reasoned, must have its counterpart in painting. So, again following this line of logical reasoning, in order to be more realistic, painting must capture the subjective realism created by light and color. This was not an academic thought process, putting reason before action. If the Impressionists had so proceeded, via academic writings and so forth, the official response m

Category: Arts - W