Women Impressionists

Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt presents Women Impressionists: Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Eva Gonzalès, and Marie Bracquemond, on view through June 1, 2008. Everyone knows the names of famous Impressionists – Manet, Monet, Degas, Renoir, Pissarro – but it is less well known that important women painters also belonged to their circle. Berthe Morisot, a successful and admired colleague, close friend of and model for Manet, was highly praised by critics for her relaxed brushstroke as the “most Impressionistic of the Impressionists.”

Berthe Morisot. The Cradle.

The American artist Mary Cassatt developed her unmistakable style in Paris and through her close contact with Degas. Eva Gonzalès, a student of Manet, left behind an oeuvre of great quality though limited quantity as a result of her early death. Marie Bracquemond exhibited with the Impressionists but began to compete with the work of her husband, Félix Bracquemond, and ultimately abandoned painting. The exhibition in the Schirn Kunsthalle includes some 150 works from numerous international museums and private collections and uses the example of these four women painters to present women artists’ contribution to the Impressionist movement.

Mary Cassatt. Mary Ellison Embroidering.

The exhibition “Women Impressionists” is sponsored exclusively by Morgan Stanley. Terra Foundation for American Art.

The four names serve as examples for the fact that considerably more women artists were active in that artistically and socio-politically turbulent epoch from about 1865 to 1895, producing high-quality paintings, drawings, engravings, and sculptures, than described in traditional art history until recent years. Compared to other movements, Impressionism was particularly suited to accept also women within its ranks. Critics maintained that the paintings of all Impressionists were explicitly “feminine,” for example: both in their subjects – everyday scenes, mother-and-child representations, gardens, interiors, still lifes, etc. – and in their smaller formats oriented towards a new middle-class clientele. Even the Impressionist style with its emphasis on light effects, its sensitive, delicate surfaces, its frequent use of white, its loose brush stroke, and its sketchiness of execution was regarded as “feminine,” in the positive as well as in the negative sense. In 1896, the year which saw the presentation of a posthumous retrospective of Berthe Morisot, the critic Camille Mauclair, looking back, described Impressionism as an altogether “feminine art” and even presented Morisot as the only true protagonist of this style. The exhibition in the Schirn Kunsthalle will critically question this biased understanding focusing on the sex of Morisot and her colleagues rather than on their achievements as modern artists for the first time.

Eva Gonzalès. Woman in White.

The exhibition in the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt also evidences though that the four women artists were taken seriously and respected by their male colleagues and by many critics at their time.

Though they partly fell into oblivion in later years, works by Morisot and Cassatt have become an integral part of the most important international collections and number among the desired works at auctions. However, they still do not enjoy a public attention comparable to that of their male colleagues. The Schirn’s ambition is to contribute to presenting this exciting aspect of Impressionism not really well known to a wider public.

Marie Bracquemond. On the Terrace at Sevres.

The approximately 150 works shown in the exhibition come from numerous international museums such as the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, the Petit Palais, Paris, the Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris, the Musée Fabre, Montpellier, the Metropolitan Museum New York, the National Gallery of Art Washington, the Newark Museum, the Philadelphia Art Museum, the Kunsthalle Bremen, and the Museum Langmatt in Zurich, as well as from various private collections.

Via Artdaily.org

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