I’d like to share today a reflection on the women of Impressionism. The painters who worked alongside the great masters, reaching or surpassing their talent, but once again forgotten in the history books.
Women who not only rebelled by working professionally as artists. They also joined a movement that was groundbreaking and scandalous in the eyes of the academy and the public opinion. They were true pioneers on two fronts.
The interplay of gazes that appears in many Impressionist works is particularly interesting. Seemingly innocent, these gazes actually represent the domination relationships that ruled society.
Men have traditionally been the ones to portray women in art. Not women as subjects but as passive and objectified beings seen through the male lens. Female artists, on the other hand, painted only what they were allowed to observe: other women, children, hardly ever men. Always interior scenes or gardens. The only themes they were granted access to.
Here, we understand how something as established as the gaze was a privilege that no woman had. They were not allowed to roam the streets of Paris or become the intellectual figure that the flâneur was in the 19th century: the artist, writer or thinker man who wanders the city in search of inspiration.
Being the subject of the gaze is what creates an artist. The Impressionist Mary Cassatt understood this and transgressed with her work "At the Opera," where the woman painted breaks the standards and becomes the subject of the gaze. Here, a woman paints another woman in a double act of empowerment. The first, being an artist. The second, portraying a woman who observes the world without fear. However, Cassatt was not naive and masterfully portrayed the society she knew she lived in. In the background, we see a man observing the protagonist. He is telling us that even the woman taking control of her life ends up being observed, objectified, and trapped in the patriarchal web. A power play in which the man wins.
My recommendation today is the book "La Revolución de las flâneuses" by Anna Mª Iglesias, in which she successfully develops this theme. And off course, the great impressionist painters Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt and Eva Gonzalez.
Beyond the difficulties, these women turned what they were given access to, considered minor subjects, into first-rate painting.
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