Berthe Morisot's Images of Women

by Anne Higonnet

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674418936
Publisher:	Harvard
Publication date:	10/01/2013
Pages:	348
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 1.06(d)

Editorial Reviews

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 York

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