IMPRESSIONISM, FASHION, AND MODERNITY
Musée d’Orsay, Paris, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Art Institute of Chicago
September 2012-September 2013
Part Three: Fashion and Psychology
Fashion is the masquerade that tells the truth–for the first time it was possible for an entire urban population to express itself trough clothing. It was Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) who, in his seminal work The Painter of Modern Life (1863), chose to undertake the task of defining “modern life” and he chose to do so through the filter of fashion. In his stunning 2008 book, La Folie Baudelaire, Roberto Calasso took up the question of why the poet selected an obscure illustrator, a journalist, Constantin Guys (1802-1892), rather than Édouard Manet (1832-1883) as his “painter of modern life.” Calasso makes the important point that this choice was deliberate and, to my mind, deliberately perverse and typical of Baudelaire’s natural contrariness and his uncanny ability to be ahead of his time. In selecting Guys, Calasso argues, Baudelaire deliberately eschewed the art world’s established figures (such as Édouard Manet) for an unknown artist, impervious to academic dictates or possible avant-garde trends, one could argue that Guys was not only an outsider, indicative of other such artists—Monet, Renoir—waiting in the wings, but that he was also a popular artist or a (non) artist of popular culture. Only someone in touch with the modern quotidian, a practicing journalist, could be truly a “painter of modern life.”
Constantin Guys. Box Seats
Modernité, a new word of mysterious origin and meaning, seemed to imply the new urban space of Paris, a space of visibility and spectacle where the “crowd” gathered and unfurled itself as in Manet’s Music in the Tuileries (1862). This early work of modernité provided a leitmotif for this public life, a necessary gathering and display of accomplishments and culture and acquisition.
Manet’s Music in the Tuileries (1862)
The women (Mme Jacques Offenbach) in their flower-like expanding dresses on the left create a V at the bottom of the canvas, dipping in the center at the little girls—women to be—and rising with the open upturned umbrellas pointing to the cluster of women on the right. The visible faces are portraits of Manet himself, on the left hand side, Baudelaire, slightly blurred, painters Albert de Balleroy (1828-1872) and Henri Fantin-Latour (1836-1904), the writers Zacharie Astruc (1833-1907) and Theophile Gautier (1811-1872), the composer Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880), and the artist’s brother Eugène, The men, topped with top hats, stand tall and besuited in bespoke suits in the next row, all in isocephaly. Clearly the artist’s attention was on the blossoming dresses and the delicate design of the park chairs, both of which were “modern” and “new” and “novel.” Therefore, for the up and coming artists of the Second Empire, modernité was an odd combination of fashion, as worn by women, and public spaces. Odd, because respectable women were not allowed in public spaces, expect under exceptional circumstances: they had to either be escorted or in the act of shopping. Realism was life in the streets and the passage of a speeded up time could be measured à la Guys by the changing details (accessories) of female frocks. According to Manet’s friend, Antonin Proust (1832-1905), the painter and his friend Baudelaire would often go to the Tuileries to observe the fashionable crowds that would gather there. Because Baudelaire was submitting The Painter of Modern Life to various publications, it can be assumed that the top hatted pair of self-proclaimed dandies discussed what “modern life” might mean.
Edgar Degas. At the Races
The Gaze and Blindness
While the male artists and writers were preoccupied with the task of rendering fashionable realism, women were kept apart from this endeavor of “sincerity” and “authenticity” associated with painting the actualité of modernity. The laws of fashion compelled them to become fictions or fantasies. Upper class women were compelled to be, not themselves, but virtual signboards for their husband’s wealth and for their own class and its responsibilities. While lower class women were suppressed by their livery, the haute bourgeois woman had to walk into public, swathed in “conspicuous consumption,” wearing moral barometers, which proclaimed their virtue or lack of righteousness. While men were busy actualizing themselves, women were trapped and wrapped in their finery. Perhaps this is why, when Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) and Berthe Morisot (1841-1895) painted women, they were often in domestic settings, at home to their friends and family and thus freed of the trappings of fashion. But these settings are often marked by confinement and enclosure and neither artist shows women out of their domestic places except in a few paintings. Indeed, after Morisot’s marriage, it is rare to see her women in a landscape setting.
Cassatt’s Cup of Tea (1879)
These paintings, which are part of named Impressionism and the era when the artists were exhibiting together, were made in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War. The plain dress of these well-to-do protected women proclaimed a momentary freedom from the obligation to display, but these intimate works of art, works by women, such as Mary Cassatt’s Cup of Tea (1879) define “reality” in a very different way. The listless women are confined between the watching silver tea service and the prison strips of the wallpaper. The pair does not speak, their mouths are pointedly covered. Not on display, captured in a private moment of non-existence, they seem to wilt into their afternoon attire. The contrast between how men painted women and how women painted women shows the very different “realities” for men and women, who live in essentially different worlds. For the Impressionists, “reality” was measured by the fiction of fashion, which effaced the women who succumbed to the fabrics, which, like armor, concealed them from view while exhibiting them for the male gaze.
Pierre Renoir. The Loge (1874)
The male artists, from Monet to Renoir, “dressed up” their models, and whether by accident or design, these lower middle class artists piled on odd assemblages of outfits, producing hybrid and somewhat louche impressions of the women in their paintings. One has only to compare Pierre Renoir’s (1841-1919) The Loge (1874) with Cassatt’s portrait of her sister Lydia, Woman in a Pearl Necklace in a Loge (1879) to sense the authenticity of Cassatt’s tastefully and discretely dressed woman and the inherent falsity of the over costumed “Nini,” Renoir’s model. As the writer Gloria Groom pointed out “The ostentatiously dressed Nini wears pink flowers in her hair and on her bodice, a strand of pearls, a gold bracelet, earrings, and noticeable makeup.” And Groom did mention the assertively strips which draw the eye to the suggestively pink rose nestled between the breasts. Cassatt’s model is a member of the haute bourgeoisie and is genuinely happy and at ease, sure of her place in society. Pretty in pink, Lydia is actually far more bared to the viewer—her shoulders are bare, her upper arms are bare—and yet the dainty pearl necklace, the corsage set on the left shoulder make her look young and innocent and decidedly respectable and virtuous. “Nini,” as Groom remarks, has an undisclosed relationship with her male companion (the artist’s brother Edmund), but one suspects, if nothing else, misplaced ostentation in this piled on display of gold and pearls.
Mary Cassatt. Woman in a Pearl Necklace in a Loge (1879)
And here is the heart of the contradiction that is the sub-text of this version of modernité as fashion: the “realism” of Realism as presented by the male artists is the “reality” of the female, as dressed up, posed and placed, and interpreted by the male. However, if one is looking for “realism” through the bodies of women, even clothes bodies, it is the female artists who truly capture this “realism.” One could make a distinction between Realism and Modernité, suggesting that Realism, such as that of Courbet is “sincere” and Realism, such as that of Manet is artificial and socially constructed. However, the male artists seem unaware that they themselves are also artificial and ignorant of their own projections of the model of panopticon surveillance as social control upon women.
Staircase of the Opèra
Aside from scattered complaints from artists and critics about the difficulties the neutral colors worn by the males (and note that only the lower class males wear color of any kind), the extent to which males have been forced to give up individuality seems to be unrealized. In addition, fashion for women, admittedly extreme and often absurd, was not seen by the males as an attempt on the part of the woman at self-actualization in an age that considered her a legal child. Writer René Delorme noted the fact that architect Charles Garnier (1825-1898) designed the new staircase of the Opéra, not for the male, but for the female:
A black suit is ugly, two black suites are even more so. But nothing compares to the ugliness of the reunion of several thousand black suits. I have sometimes wondered which inexplicable oddity has made our generation wear this funerary costume in the gorgeous décor of the palace of Charles Garnier. The staircase of the Opéra, with its gold, its marble, its onyx appeals for a grand costume that our mundane uniform will never grant.
If grand costumes are left to women, the female artists had little interest in grandeur. For an expression of women as people, real individuals, we must turn to the women of Impressionism, especially Berthe Morisot (her counterpart is Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894), who show the reality of the modern life of modern women (of a certain class). Morisot is the primary artist who shows the interior life of women, often through her own life, as sad as it was. In The Sisters (1869), Morisot and her sister Edma, wearing white dressed dappled with sprigs of flowers sit on a pink and white flowered sofa with a framed Japanese frame between them. As if they were posing for a daguerreotype, the sisters are still and pensive, waiting with little anticipation for the domestic life that lies ahead.
Morisot’s The Sisters (1869)
In yet another self-portrait that uses the photographer’s studio as a model, Mary Cassatt paints herself in a simple white dress leaning, in a twisted and ungraceful position, on the arm of an unseen chair. Again the expressionless face, common to long poses in front of the lens. What is striking about the paintings by women of women is the limitations of this world. Women artists of this period rarely venture outdoors and when they do, they stay close to home. They are excluded from the scenes of the Bohème and the demi-mondaine, they rarely executed landscapes en plein air, and they did not obsessively observe men as a kind of spectacle. Instead, as in Morisot’s Interior (1872), there is often an air of melancholy and sadness, an atmosphere of womanly waiting and female passivity that is very different from male alienation acted out in Caillebotte.
Morisot’s Interior (1872)
Fashion as Male Desire
And yet when one looks at the beautiful costumes—for these elaborate dresses cannot be called “clothes”—these decades are aesthetically stunning. Although women were being constructed as shoppers, they are portrayed by male novelists—Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) and Émile Zola (1840-1902)—as maniacal consumers who cannot control their cravings for these costumes. But it is not the women Impressionists who celebrate these gorgeous gowns; it is the male artists who seem to revel in the ribbons, laces, embroideries, trimmings, gloves, dainty shoes, and boned corsets. One has only to set Morisot’s Woman at her Toilette (1875/80) next to Manet’s Woman Fastening her Garter (1878-9), as they are in the catalogue, to notice the different and gendered points of view.
Morisot’s Woman at her Toilette (1875/80)
Both women are dressed in their underwear: corset, chemise, petticoats, in the moments before the dress, the final layer, is slipped over the head. But Morisot’s model is allowed her privacy and her back is tuned to the viewer; Manet’s subject faces the spectator and her bared breasts, barely contained in her corset, are a spectacle for the male’s gaze. With Morisot, the point of view is companionable–one could be a friend, an equal, while Manet’s perspective is elevated, encouraging a male gaze from above, staring down and into the breasts. Writing about Manet’s Nana (1877), expert on all things corset writer Valerie Steele observed that the model is “neither fully dressed nor completely undressed.”
Manet’s Woman Fastening her Garter (1878-9)
Her corset contains the fullness of her flesh, like the cuirasse ésthetique of a classical male nude, while its satin mimics the softness of her skin. Within only a few decades, the corset would become internalized through diet and exercise, resulting in a new cultural ideal of femininity…Ultimately Nana does not demonstrate that the satin corset was more sexually potent than the naked body, but rather than the corset drew its erotic charm from the naked body it covered and accentuated. It was the movement between dress and undress—and, of course, the idea of a woman who takes her clothes off for a man—-that aroused and scandalized viewers.
Manet’s Nana (1877)
Just as male sexual activities are controlled by social dictates, male desire is guided and directed towards certain areas of the women’s bodies. These male sexual desires, as these paintings make clear, are not reserved for one’s wife but are expressed with prostitutes. For the male, the corset is a fetish object; for the female, the corset is an instrument of torture, existing to reshape the human body into a mold dictated by a changing parade of fashion designers. The female breast is moved up one decade, pressed down upon in the next; her rear end vanishes under a balloon skirt one year, only to be thrust outward and backward in the next year. One hundred and fifty years later, it is hard to imagine how these women managed to drag pounds of excessive fabric behind them or how they breathed or how they managed to use the toilet. The beauty of the costumes designed by the first artist of the haute couture Charles Frederick Worth (1825-1895) and his colleagues depended totally upon a ruthless repatriation of the female form forcing it into an object designed to wear fashions, designed by males, on a drawing board.
In contrast to the erect and still posture of men, the characteristic fashionable “fluttering” of female hands is explained by the rigors of fashion: when women began removing their tight clothes, such as a pair of gloves, they had to move their fingers to start circulation in their limbs. The sight of women so brutally corseted, bound in by artificial boning, must have been comforting to the men given how the women had demanded their “rights” during each and every revolution. After the fearsome display of female rage in the French Revolution, it was reassuring to see women emoting over the latest hats rather than over the price of bread. And certainly after the socially conscious works of Gustave Courbet (1819-1877), a clear rebuke to those who stifled revolutionary hopes, the fascination with haute couture of the later Realists was a relief to a war weary public. In fact, the entire Second Empire and the art of the Realists of the 1850s and 1860s was a refusal to come to terms with political modernity. Manet and the Impressionist substituted scandal (Manet) and provocations (Impressionists) for social critique and these male Realists celebrated the political status quo as defined by women’s fashions.
The final post on this series will conclude the discussion on the avant-garde and fashion.
If you have found this material useful, please give credit to
Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed. Thank you.