Berthe Morisot - 'That eye-on-the-object look'

"I like either extreme novelty or things of the past." This declaration is etched onto the wall of the very first room of Dulwich Picture Gallery's Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism exhibition. As you make your way through the rooms of this intimate retrospective, you are thus primed to peer, Janus-like, backwards through art history and forwards into the cataclysmic cultural shifts of the early twentieth century. Three quite different paintings, but all unmistakably Morisot, vied for my attention on my visit. And aptly, all of the trio - unashamedly Impressionist paintings - pointed in different directions - towards the present, the past, and the future.  

The first painting to waylay me was The Psyche Mirror. At first glance your reaction is that future bugbear that gets levelled at all of the Impressionists. Rather than the shock of the new, what our modern, saturated eyes see is the 'chocolate box criticism'. The trouble is, though, that this deflects you from really looking. Take any amount of time with a painting that tosses up that tedious cliché, delve a little, get underneath, and you'll see - particularly with Impressionism - things settle. Or rather shimmer into glorious motion as you shift back and forth between what is being depicted and how it is being depicted.

The Psyche Mirror (1876)

This is a stunning painting. Once I'd got beyond looking at the subject, the balance of the woman tentatively raising her slip whilst she side-eyes the mirror, you begin to think of what exactly it is that those combinations of colour are doing. The almost diaphanous and yet in no way white of her garment; the soft golden light seemingly escaping the room, disappearing Alice-like through the looking-glass; and the bolder colours that prevent it all from floating away: the dark blue necktie clutching at the woman's neck, fixing her both in and outside of the glass, and that ravishing and luxuriantly red carpet completely grounding her through its gravitational pull. It’s a breathtaking contrast. And if it came atop any Impressionist laden chocolate box pushed in my direction, I'd scoff the lot. 

Morisot is very much of that nineteenth century movement. She is - I'll say it - my favourite Impressionist. Whenever Impressionist paintings come up on University Challenge, I hope that she'll be included. And unlike with Monet or Renoir, I always recognise her work when it does. Perhaps it's because she works mostly in that most un-Impressionistic environment: the interior. Thus her work, bereft of the greater array of light that the outdoorsmen have at their unchaperoned disposal, needs to work harder. Of Impressionism indoors, only Whistler comes close to being her equal. In fact, his much more famous - and definitely inferior painting (compare them) The White Girl reminds me a lot of The Psyche Mirror. 

James McNeill Whistler, The White Girl (1862)

Whistler's woman is fixed. She is posing. Morisot's woman shifts, is autonomous and appears free from the gaze of the painter. That may well be Whistler's point, but it still means that his subject is just that, a subject. For me, Morisot isn't just equalling her male contemporaries, she's blowing them away. That I, nevertheless, appreciate and enjoy the Whistler, is an indicator that this admiration is no faint praise. 

If The Psyche Mirror is very much of the present, Morisot's Girl on a Divan from 1885 is anticipating what is to come. If you had dated this painting twenty years later, I would not have been surprised. If - I'd never encountered the painting - and you'd asked me who is it by, I'd have guessed at Matisse. 

Girl on a Divan (1885)

It is more than the lozenges of colour on the dress. It's those rough yet brilliant brush strokes - up close to the work the girl is gone, an evanescence that leaves us only with the seemingly scatterbrained vectors of paint. There's almost the sense that Morisot wishes to go that step further but doesn't quite dare. Take a look, too, at Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's version of the subject - also called Girl on a Divan - some two decades later. Those haphazard, abstract shapes now dominate the whole, but you could perhaps take a guess at where he's getting his inspiration from, and not just in his titles. Morisot's flippancy with the phrase 'extreme novelty' is so much more than that. She is a radical, unequivocally part of the road-crew paving the way for Modernism.

The painting that lingers longest, though, and the one that gazes back, deep into the past, is Paule Gobillard Painting. An objective glance at this depiction of Morisot's niece going about her art, initially reveals little that isn't lovely and unassuming. Again, it's the chocolate box criticism. And again, that criticism evaporates as soon as you let go and dive in. There was something strangely familiar about it too, something that sent a prickle and then a thrill down the back of my neck.

Paule Gobillard Painting (1887)

I sat down on the bench in the centre of the room and thought. It came to me in a flash. The echo of my favourite ever artwork: Artemisia Gentileschi's Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting was direct and inescapable.     

Artemisia Gentileschi, Self-Portrait as an Allegory of Painting (1639)

That I didn't even need to flash up the Artemisia on my phone - I know the painting like the back of the Italian's right hand: poised, aloft, delicately holding a paintbrush - was testament to the resemblance and inspiration. Gobillard's right hand is lower and horizontal. But check out the gaze of both of these artists. W.H. Auden describes it best in his poem 'Horae Canonicae'.

You need not see what someone is doing
to know if it is his vocation ...

How beautiful it is,
that eye-on-the-object look.

The 'rapt expression, forgetting themselves in a function'; the stray, loose hairs falling across the temple; the bare forearm ready for business; the soft flushed pink occupying the cheeks of both women; the vague hint of a necklace falling onto Gobillard's chest, hinting towards the greater solidity of Artemisia's golden chain. Are the barely discernible tinges of green in the niece's coiffure an allusion to the imperious green of the Italian's dress? Perhaps. That Morisot toured extensively in southern England on her honeymoon, seeking out paintings in both public and private collections - the Artemisia is part of The Royal Collection - means she could well have encountered it. And who is to say that she didn't come across it in reproduction form?  

Does it seem, too, that there is allegory going on in the Morisot painting? The statue, cut in half, behind Gobillard seems unnecessary - or rather a strange choice of object for the composition. Is Morisot nodding back in time to the 'tradition'? Or rather reflecting on the severing of a tradition - I feel the statues thighs are those of a woman - that of the male establishment's barring of women from the rank of a 'great master'. Ultimately, they failed with Artemisia. Likewise, with Morisot. 

Indeed, did I say this painting was looking back into the past? Well, yes. But in its subject, it's also a cri de guerre for the future, one that almost seems to be allegorised by the whirl that is taking place beneath Gobillard's right hand, an evaporating maelstrom of action. Women artists have all too frequently - even today in the twenty-first century – been overlooked. Also, does this exhibition need the supporting cast of  those who have influenced Morisot: Watteau, Fragonard, Boucher and Gainsborough? If the answers is no, then I'm guilty too of bringing Whistler into the equation. But what that does do, is show how a woman artist is not just matching her male precursors, but surpassing them. The risk is, that if she's not up to the task you'll spend more time looking at the earlier paintings. Not so. They fade in the glow of Morisot's talent and she had my undivided attention. The baton of female art truly has been picked up and run with. Or rather we are now learning to see that it has been run with for well over five centuries - many of us have just not been noticing. Not everyone. Katy Hessel's vital and timely The Story of Art Without Men is a fantastic corrective that I cannot recommend highly enough. Likewise, her wonderful podcast The Great Women Artists.  Morisot is, of course, featured. As well as countless other female artists, all of whom deserve a retrospective as exquisite and as arresting as the one at Dulwich. 

The Cradle (1871)

Without a doubt it is a timely and wonderful exhibition. If I had one minor grumble, it would have been that I would have liked to see again the first paintings that brought me into Morisot's orbit. The Cradle, is one such work (Katy Hessel, and her podcast guest Cindy Kang, the curator at the Barnes Foundation, are incredibly engaging on the subject of this painting, particularly the ambivalence of the mother). Encountered at the Musée d'Orsay many years ago, I longed to see that transparent pink gauze above the baby's cot again. Up close, the painting here seems almost like an act of conjuring. No matter, a small exhibition allows you to focus, and it's no bad thing to be left wanting more.  Let's have - let's demand - an even bigger Berthe Morisot retrospective further down the line. 

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Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism is at Dulwich Picture Gallery until the 10th September.