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.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Book Description
Like her colleagues - Cassatt, Degas, Monet and Renoir - Berthe 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 clear picture of visual traditions that, though very much a part of Morisot's world and work, figure only marginally in art history. Amateur picture making - enormously popular among 19th-century women - and industrialized feminine imagery dominated by the fashion plate provided a background and context for Morisot's imagery. Focusing on formal choices - poses, composition, brushwork - Higonnet compares Morisot's images of women with those of Casatt, Degas and Manet. And she examines critical themes: Morisot's self-portraiture; her attempts, with Cassatt, at painting the female nude; and her pictorial explorations of the mother-daughter relationship.
