The Body in Time looks at two different genres in relation to the construction of femininity in late nineteenth-century France: Degas's representation of ballet dancers and the transforming tradition of female portraiture. Class, gender, power, and agency are at stake in both arenas, but they play themselves out in different ways via different pictorial languages. Degas's depictions of anonymous young female ballerinas at the Paris Opera reflect his fascination with the physical exertions and prosaic setting of the dancer's sexualized body. Unlike the standard Romantic depictions of the ballerina, Degas's dancers are anonymous spread-legged workers on public display. Female portraiture and self-portraiture, in contrast, depicted the unique and the distinctive: privileged women, self-assured individuals transgressing gender conventions. Focusing on Degas's representation of the dancer, Tamar Garb examines the development of Degas's oeuvre from its early Realist documentary ambitions to the abstracted Symbolist renderings of the feminine as cypher in his later works. She argues that despite the apparent depletion of social significance and specificity, Degas's later works remain deeply enmeshed in contemporary gendered ways of viewing and experiencing art and life. Garb also looks at the transformation in the genre of portraiture heralded by the "new woman," examining the historical expectations of female portraiture and demonstrating how these expectations are challenged by new notions of female autonomy and interiority. Women artists such as Anna Klumpke, Rosa Bonheur, and Anna Bilinska deployed the language of Realism in their own self-representation. The figure of femininity remained central to the personal, political, and pictorial imperatives of artists across the spectrum of modern aesthetics. Gender and genre intersect throughout this book to show how these categories mutually impact one another.

The Body in Time: Figures of Femininity in Late Nineteenth-Century France (University of Kansas Franklin D. Murphy Lecture)

Arts & Photography

Garb, Tamar

History & Criticism

University of Washington Press

This first volume in the series focuses on aspects of Realism, Impressionism, and Post-Impressionism in Paris between 1848 and 1900. Discussing works by Courbet, Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Cezanne, Morisot, and other great painters of the period, the authors demonstrate how some historians view this art as representative of the social, historical, and economic circumstances in which it was produced, how the painterly effects of the art are evaluated, and how a feminist perspective can help to explain art works and change our perception of them.

Modernity and Modernism: French Painting in the Nineteenth Century (Modern Art Practices and Debates)

Harrison, Charles

Fer, Briony

Frascina, Francis

Blake, Nigel

Biographies & Memoirs

Yale University Press

The Union of Women Painters and Sculptors was founded in Paris in 1881 to represent the interests of women artists and to facilitate the exhibition of their work. This lively and informative book traces the history of the first fifteen years of the organization and places it in the contexts of the Paris art world and the development of feminism in the late nineteenth century. Tamar Garb explores how the Union campaigned to have women artists written about in the press and admitted to the Salon jury and into the prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts and describes how the organization's leaders took their campaigns into the French parliament itself. Although the women of the Union were often quite conservative politically, socially, and stylistically, says Garb, they believed that women had a special gift that would enhance France's cultural reputation and maintain the uplifting moral-cultural position that seemed in jeopardy at the turn of the century. Focusing on the developments that made the prominence of the organization possible, Garb discusses the growth of the women's movement, educational reforms, institutional changes in the art world, and critical debates and contemporary scientific thought. She examines contemporary perceptions of both art and femininity, showing how the understanding of one affected the image of the other. This book reverses conventional accounts of late nineteenth-century French art, offering a new picture of the Paris art world from the point of view of a group of women who were marginalized by its dominant institutions.

Sisters of the Brush: Women`s Artistic Culture in Late Nineteenth-Century Paris

The meaning of a painted portrait and even its subject may be far more complex than expected, Tamar Garb reveals in this book. She charts for the first time the history of French female portraiture from its heyday in the early nineteenth century to its demise in the early twentieth century, showing how these paintings illuminate evolving social attitudes and aesthetic concerns in France over the course of the century.
The author builds the discussion around six canonic works by Ingres, Manet, Cassatt, Cézanne, Picasso, and Matisse, beginning with Ingres’s idealized portrait of Mme de Sennones and ending with Matisse’s elegiac last portrait of his wife. During the hundred years that separate these works, the female portrait went from being the ideal genre for the expression of painting’s capacity to describe and embellish “nature,” to the prime locus of its refusal to do so. Picasso’s Cubism, and specifically Ma Jolie, provides the fulcrum of this shift.

The Painted Face: Portraits of Women in France, 1814-1914

Spanning nearly seven decades, a comprehensive consideration of the psychologically acute and surprisingly honest portraits of Alice Neel Widely regarded as one of the most important American painters of the 20th century, Alice Neel is internationally recognized for her contributions to Abstract Expressionism, especially her perceptive portraiture. Neel (1900–1984) was a portrait painter at a time when this was traditionally the role of a male artist. After ascending to prominence in the 1960s as the feminist movement gained momentum, she has remained an iconic figure in the history of American painting.
A self-proclaimed “collector of souls,” Neel often painted friends and family, as well as the celebrated artists and writers of her day, such as Andy Warhol, Frank O’Hara, and Meyer Shapiro, delving into personalities and idiosyncrasies with a rare frankness. Alice Neel: Painted Truths brings together paintings that demonstrate Neel’s range and ability, along with insightful commentary from four leading art historians. Although the book focuses on her portraits, it also covers the artist’s early social realist paintings and cityscapes, tracing the evolution of Neel’s style and examining themes that she revisited throughout her career.

Alice Neel: Painted Truths

Walker, Barry

LEWISON, JEREMY

STORR, Robert

Individual Artists

Bodies of Modernity: Figure and Flesh in Fin-de-Siecle France (Interplay)

INTERPLAY: A series that addresses controversial themes and issues in the arts. Bodies of Modernity explores the ways in which men's and women's bodies are represented in late nineteenth-century France. Thought to be unequivocally different from one another, modern men and women were expected to express their sexuality and social positions in the clothes they wore, the poses they struck, and the behavior they exhibited. In a series of case studies, Bodies of Modernity looks at works by Cezanne, Renoir, Seurat, Tissot, and Caillebotte as well as photographs of male body builders to establish an image of the modern body. Well-known works such as Renoir's Nude in the Sunlight, Seurat's Young Woman Powdering Herself, and Cezanne's Large Bathers are given new interpretations, while lesser known paintings like Tissot's series on The Women of Paris or Caillebotte's iconoclastic Man at the Bath are looked at seriously for the first time. Bodies of Modernity is an original account of one of the best-loved periods in Western art history. By taking "figure and flesh" as its focus, it bypasses traditional art historical categories and style labels to provide a reading of the work of the Impressionists and their contemporaries that gets to the heart of French society of the period.

Bodies of Modernity: Figure and Flesh in Fin-De-Siecle France (Interplay)

Thames&Hudson

Bodies of Modernity explores the ways in which men's and women's bodies are represented in late nineteenth-century France. Thought to be unequivocally different from one another, modern men and women were expected to express their sexuality and social positions in the clothes they wore, the poses they struck, and the behavior they exhibited. In a series of case studies, Bodies of Modernity looks at works by Cezanne, Renoir, Seurat, Tissot, and Caillebotte as well as photographs of male body builders to establish an image of the modern body. Well-known works such as Renoir's Nude in the Sunlight, Seurat's Young Woman Powdering Herself, and Cezanne's Large Bathers are given new interpretations, while lesser known paintings like Tissot's series on The Women of Paris or Caillebotte's iconoclastic Man at the Bath are looked at seriously for the first time. Bodies of Modernity is an original account of one of the best-loved periods in Western art history. By taking "figure and flesh" as its focus, it bypasses traditional art historical categories and style labels to provide a reading of the work of the Impressionists and their contemporaries that gets to the heart of French society of the period.

A biography of a leading figure in the Impressionist movement, Berthe Morisot (1841-95), who as a woman painter broke free of the restrictions of era and gender.

Berthe Morisot

Adler, Kathleen

Harpercollins

Berthe Morisot was the leading woman impressionist. This book considers her work in the context of the artistic debates of the time and discusses the extent to which Morisot participated in these.

Phaidon Press

Shows paintings, watercolors, drawings, and etchings by Morisot, briefly traces her life, and assesses her place in modern art

Cornell Univ Pr

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Garb, Tamar. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Garb, Tamar

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Garb, Tamar. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Body in Time: Figures of Femininity in Late Nineteenth-Century France (University of Kansas Franklin D. Murphy Lecture)

Modernity and Modernism: French Painting in the Nineteenth Century (Modern Art Practices and Debates)

Sisters of the Brush: Women`s Artistic Culture in Late Nineteenth-Century Paris

The Painted Face: Portraits of Women in France, 1814-1914

Alice Neel: Painted Truths

Bodies of Modernity: Figure and Flesh in Fin-De-Siecle France (Interplay)

Bodies of Modernity: Figure and Flesh in Fin-de-Siecle France (Interplay)

Berthe Morisot

Berthe Morisot

Berthe Morisot