Impressionism : A Feminist Reading. This item is unavailable.Impressionism : A Feminist Reading

Broude (art history, American U., Washington, DC) analyzes the philosophical underpinnings of landscape painting in the later 19th century, and reflects on the critical misconceptions attached to Impressionism, especially Monet, and the notion that the school was scientifically based. Includes 38 color plates. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

In its own day, impressionism was described as a "feminine" style of painting, admired or disliked for its fluid brushwork, its emotional, subjective engagement with nature. But male 20th-century critics, according to Broude, "regendered" impressionism as "masculine" by interpreting it as a cool, detached art of optical realism largely devoid of feeling or content. Broude, art historian at the American University in Washington, D.C., views the impressionists as the direct heirs to the romantics in their desire to communicate their emotional experience and in their rebellion against a scientific establishment that assumed a "masculine" mantle of objectivity and reason. A weakness in her argument is that she omits extended discussion of recent scholarship that puts impressionism in a social and political context. Nevertheless, this meticulously argued, resplendently illustrated study gives us a new way of looking at the impressionist enterprise.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Broude criticizes accepted art theory, "gendering" nature as feminine and science, light theory, and Impressionist art criticism as masculine, as bending nature to its will. But because she builds her arguments more on literary than visual image and imposes late-20th-century ideas on 19th-century painting, the gender associations she has established seem loose and narrowly applied. The reproductions are pleasing but add little to the text. The index could be more useful. For example, Alberti is discussed in the text but not indexed. For feminist literature collections.
- Ellen Bates, New York
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.