We learn in this exhibition that Marie Bracquemond’s husband Felix was the director of the Atelier de peinture de la Manufacture national de céramique de Sevres and the manager of the Haviland porcelain factory in Limoges. He was an important man in the arts and in business, but he also disparaged his wife’s painting, almost from the moment they were married. In 1890, at his (I would imagine) hectoring insistence, Marie abandoned her work. She lived another 26 years and died a recluse. Her art is so good that I think of her husband as one of the real villains in French art of the Impressionist era.
Exhibition curator Ingrid Pfeiffer, in her lead essay in the very informative and finely printed catalog, writes about the “feminization” of Impressionist style. Much of the subject material of Impressionist painting had to do with women (ladies at the theater and in the boudoir, women at their baths, et al). The style of this painting (“the accentuation of the play of light, its bright sensuous surfaces, the liberal use of white, the visible brushstroke” and many other devices), according to Pfeiffer, gave it a reputation for being quintessentially feminine.
“Yet this characterization was also used as grounds for censure,” she writes, “and Impressionist art was accused of being capricious, nervous, irresolute, superficial, imitative, unfinished, naïve, weak, ephemeral, and of no lasting value - all attributes that were generally reserved for women.”
It’s difficult enough to paint well and to have your work exhibited well. Because women painters so often have to put up with the kind of headwinds that Pfeifer describes, I believe the four women celebrated in this exhibition are to be congratulated not only for being such fine artists, but also for being consistently rugged fighters. Mary Cassatt is quoted in the exhibition as saying “women should be someone, and not something.” These four women were someone, indeed.
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