Perspectives on Morisot

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

While male impressionists painted the dashing life of Paris's boulevards, Berthe Morisot (1841-1895) portrayed women and children of the suburbs. Sexist avant-garde critics of the 1890s praised her ``feminine charm,'' yet today her fluid, contradiction-laden imagery can be read as a proto-feminist reaction to the confines of her bourgeois existence. Ironically, her aggressively ambitious mother encouraged her to earn her living as an artist. New evidence presented here reveals that Morisot's break with the establishment Salon was initially not of her own choice--the Salon jury rejected her paintings even as the ``doubledealing'' refuse was making submissions to the impressionists' Independent showcase. These seven intriguing lectures deal with the ``endless mirror game'' of her ambivalent self-portraits; her modeling for Edouard Manet; how she depicted costume; and her remarkable painting Wet Nurse , ``almost fauve before the fact,'' a microcosm of an industry whose mainstay was ``regarded more as a highly prized milch cow than as a human being.'' Edelstein is director of the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago. (Feb.)