From Library Journal
Higonnet describes Berthe Morisot as a sophisticated and accomplished woman living a life of bourgeois privilege and devoted to her art and her daughter, whose image she painted countless times. A skilled impressionist, she was the sister-in-law of Edouard Manet and the aunt of Paul Valery, and her list of friends and acquaintances reads like a Who's Who of 19th-century Paris. The author, who also wrote the biography Berthe Morisot (HarperCollins, 1991), documents the female and amateur artistic traditions that relate to Morisot's own beginnings. Morisot, like Mary Cassatt, painted from the female perspective, but both failed at painting the female nude. The footnoted text is nicely illustrated, mostly in black and white with a few color plates. The conclusion, however, is problematic because it discusses image, but not image as Morisot would have understood it. For 19th-century social history and women's studies collections.
- Ellen Bates, New YorkCopyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Book Description
Berthe Morisot has taken her place as a founder of Impressionism and a leader in women's history. Like her colleagues - Cassatt, Degas, Monet, and Renoir - Morisot sought to represent the experience of modern life, a project that for her entailed rethinking what it meant to be a woman in the 19th century. Through close attention to the artist's work and its context, Anne Higonnet shows how Morisot transformed her femininity and its visual culture into Impressionist paintings. Higonnet presents a picture of visual tradition that, though very much a part of Morisot's world and work, figure only marginally in art history. Amateur picture making, for instance, was emormously popular among 19th-century women. Higonnet locates Morisot's origins in this private practice, then traces her reactions to an industrialized feminine imagery characterized by consumption and dominated by the fashion plate. This discussion provides a background and context for Morisot's imagery, but also helps to explain the "look" of her pictures. Focusing on formal choices - poses, props, composition, and especially brushwork - Higonnet compares Morisot's images of women with those of Cassatt, Degas and Manet and details the emergence of her stylistic and thematic individuality. She also shows us the critical themes of Morisot's late work: her self-portraiture; her attempts, with Cassatt, at painting the female nude; and her pictorial explorations of the mother-daughter relationship. Combining social history, art criticism, and psychological insights, this illustrated volume renegotiates the boundaries of art history as well as the terms of women's self-representation.
