A lovely delicacy of color, a subtle gray-white harmony as soft as silk. That’s what attracts me to this painting on the back wall of the Art Institute’s main Impressionism gallery. In a room full of loud Renoirs, Berthe Morisot’s Woman at Her Toilette turns down the volume and draws me into a more intimate space. Against a vague backdrop of loose brushwork, a woman sits before a mirror arranging her hair. One of her shoulder straps has fallen to reveal an expanse of skin that looks as soft and unblemished as her satin gown. It is a beautiful, calming image, evocative of silence and solitude. But even as these initial impressions work themselves out in my mind, another reality intrudes. The closer I get to the painting, the looser, sketchier, more active it appears. Morisot’s brush seems to be everywhere at once, quickly laying on streaks of gray, white, blue, green in a dazzling number of different directions. The light, gauzy background is in fact a blizzard of brushstrokes; the lower dress is a construction of white and gray paint strips laid sketchily and obviously over a visible ground. What seemed soft and calm from a distance, a moment frozen in time, now appears vigorous and agitated, the product of a quick hand and quick eye. Even by Impressionist standards some passages of this work are extremely free and aggressive, the paint applied in emphatic, in-your-face strokes that cling flatly to the picture plane and tend to dissolve the very forms they define. Viewed closely, the final product is still beautiful, still harmonious, but the key of the harmony has changed.
The painting divides easily into four vertical zones: mirror, still life, woman, and that large, vague expanse of brushwork on the right side–what is that thing? At first it appears to be a flat, patterned area: a patch of floral wallpaper, perhaps. Then I notice a form that seems to stand against the wall and frame the pattern, and I try to read the passage as a picture on a wall or another mirror, or even a mantlepiece with a painted firescreen. I struggle to make the brushwork cohere into a recognizable form, but none of the possibilities seems to fit. And just when I’ve decided to interpret it as a wallpapered wall and move on to another part of the painting, the puzzle pieces finally come together for a second, and I see a bed. Of course. What else would one expect to find in a boudoir? The strange ‘frame’ shape becomes the head of the bed, a plump pillow lies below it, and under that we see the bed’s side covered by a floral spread. Once recognized, the form can always be decoded, but it is never seen as automatically as the woman or the mirror. Morisot makes us work to see the bed. By painting it so loosely that her brushwork tends to resemble only itself–strokes of paint on a flat surface; by drawing the bedframe so that it doesn’t obviously recede into perspective space, but seems to lie flat against a wall of paint; by painting the floral pattern of the bedcover so that instead of following the forms of the bed it seems to climb vine-like up a flat wall (a passage that anticipates the flattening patterns in some of Matisse’s works)–in all of these ways, Morisot forces us to actively construct the objects we see. The viewer becomes the painter’s accomplice in the creation of meaning.
This is an artistic strategy we usually associate with High Modernism. I’m thinking of the way Picasso makes us work to recognize the objects in some of his Cubist still lifes or how Faulkner forces the reader to construct a coherent narrative from the perceptions and recollections of Benjy in The Sound and the Fury. In the context of Impressionism, Morisot’s approach contrasts with that of Monet, whose works of the 1870's-90's feature immediately recognizable forms (a bridge over a river, wheat stacks in a field, the facade of Rouen cathedral) that dissolve into brushwork, into a surface of paint. Morisot’s work comes from the other direction. It is more constructive than deconstructive. Her brushwork comes together only with viewerly time and effort to create an illusion of form–all the while reminding us that it is an illusion.
The loosest and most difficult passage in this entire painting–even harder to understand than the bed–is the area above the still life between the woman’s head and the mirror. Three vertical slats with accents of color placed between them suggest a window with a view of flowers, possibly a garden. But the area is extremely obscure; it resists definite identification. The shape at the left that reads as a curtain might also be part of a canopy over the bed. And if the passage is indeed a view of a garden through a window, then the style and color harmonizes so well with the bed that we might almost imagine the garden to have invaded the boudoir. The wall between exterior and interior blurs like so many of the painting’s other forms, and the flowery background brushwork assumes a windswept quality, like a garden on a breezy summer day. This feeling of openness mitigates the painting’s sense of enclosure and complicates any feminist interpretation that might see the woman as a beautiful creature in a gilded cage. This room is both closed and open; like Morisot’s brushwork, it is both controlled and free.
Into the light, delicate harmonies of this room the mirror intrudes like the oom-pah of a tuba among the pleasant tones of woodwinds. With its dark color and sharp angles, this large mirror would seem wholly out of place were it not subtly integrated into the composition by Morisot’s design. The straight, vertical edge of the mirror frame ‘frames’ one side of the still life/window area, while the angle of the lower mirror is (even more wittily) mirrored by the angle of the woman’s left arm. This kind of visual wit is familiar to us from the works of Degas and Manet, and its presence here comes as a pleasant surprise. But even thus integrated, the mirror still seems like an intruder, a heavy, solid, masculine form in an airy, soft, feminine space. Should we think of the mirror as a masculine symbol? While it is tempting to identify the mirror’s implied reflection–a vision of the woman as others will see her–with the dreaded ‘male gaze,’ that Evil Eye of feminist theory, we should not assume that the woman is arranging herself solely to meet the glances of men. Indeed, if she is preparing for a day of visiting or receiving guests, she is dressing primarily to face women’s eyes. So perhaps we should leave the mirror itself aside for a moment and consider the frame. This heavy wooden frame is a much more obviously incongruous, and thus masculine, element. It should remind us that all glances, male and female, directed at this woman take place within a society framed by men, a world in which the rules and social structures that determine much of one’s life are made by and for men and (very often) enforced by women. The rules demanding that the twenty-something Morisot (who was in many respects a conventional woman of the Parisian upper middle-class) could only sketch at the Louvre when chaperoned by her mother, that she could only pose for Manet under the same conditions, that her works would always (even today, by well-meaning critics) be judged by different standards from those applied to her male peers–these are just three examples from the elaborate system of social structures, mores and prejudices that combined to form the male-ordered frame in which Morisot lived and worked, the frame within which all reflection, all vision, all sight occurred.
It is highly significant, then, that when Morisot signed this painting, she signed it on the mirror frame. With this act she symbolically takes possession of the frame and the male framing power it represents, the power to create social structures, to establish norms, to determine the way reality is seen.
The mirror image, therefore, must be a reflection of Morisot’s own work: her frame, her vision. And it’s a melting vision. Marshall Berman in his book All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity uses the phrase "melting vision" for Marx’s description of life under the triumphant nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, a revolutionary time when all of society’s former structures were being blown away and replaced by new ones more amenable to bourgeois capitalism. In art (as I have said elsewhere) Impressionism was such a bourgeois revolution. It ultimately replaced the old monarchical art system (government commissions, Salon exhibitions, enormous history paintings) with a network of private collectors and capitalist dealers, independent exhibitions, and paintings small enough to hang on middle-class walls. So it’s appropriate that Morisot’s Impressionist vision is one in which familiar forms dissolve before our eyes. The still life melts into smeared and dripping paint, while the dress separates into a scattering of brushstrokes at the bottom of the mirror. Finally, at the left edge of the painting, all form dissolves into an ultimate deconstructive haze, a chaos of brushwork that might represent both the destruction of old forms and the incoherence before the birth of the new.
This painting exists between the extremes of mirror and bed, deconstruction and construction, and in its center is the woman, one arm lowered toward the mirror that dissolves form, the other arm raised toward the bed that rises into recognition. The woman is the most legible element in the painting, but even her figure contains some puzzling obscurities. Her face and left arm have a strange, blurred quality that seems to suggest more than just the artist’s usual vigorous handling. There is a hint here of a new way of seeing, better attuned to the demands of modern life. If we leave Morisot for a moment and walk down the hall a short distance to the Manet gallery, we will find an even better example of this new vision in that painter’s 1866 Races at Longchamps. As our eye travels among the spectators arrayed on the left side of the painting, we can pick out a few individuals–a top hat here, a parasol there–but the painting very quickly becomes sketchy to the point of abstraction. The paint, like the large group of people, becomes a mass, a crowd, a collection of color patches packed tightly together. It represents a large number of people seen but not differentiated. Looking at the Manet, I think of my own experience that same morning walking from my hotel in River North down through the busy Chicago Loop and across to the Art Institute. How many people did I see? Hundreds, easily. How many would I recognize if seen again? Two or three, and that’s probably a wildly optimistic estimate. This distanced, de-focused, indefinite way of seeing, a feature of much Impressionist painting, is one of the conditions of modern urban life, a way of keeping our sensory impressions down to a manageable level and avoiding overload. One unsettling aspect of Morisot’s painting is the implication that this new vision is not restricted to crowded public spaces. We see it here on the woman’s face and arm, even here in the boudoir, the most private of places.
In this private place the woman turns her back to us and lets a strap fall from her shoulder. In the work of most other painters (Degas being a notable exception) this image would carry an unmistakable erotic charge, the thrill of voyeuristic pleasure. Here, though, any erotic fantasy on the viewer’s part is quickly forestalled by the blatant reality of Morisot’s paint. This is no airbrushed nymph out of Bouguereau, her eyes coyly lowered so as not to interfere with our view of her photographically illusionistic body. Nor is this Manet’s Olympia with her challenging gaze. In Morisot’s work, the paint itself stares us in the face. Instead of a smooth, inviting expanse of soft skin across the woman’s upper back, we see the material from which this illusion of skin is constructed: overlapping strips of pigment that still wear the marks of the painter’s brush. The artist’s painterly realism leaves little room for reverie. The greatest power in this passage is the power of pigments to bind and harmonize and create; the greatest sensuality is that of painterly touch. The only eroticism in this painting is an erotics of paint.
Like all of Morisot’s best works, Woman at Her Toilette performs a delicate negotiation between materials and representation, between the reality of paint and the illusion of form. An accomplished painterly juggler, Morisot keeps all of the work’s opposing tendencies in play. This painting is ‘both-and’ rather than ‘either-or’: both paint and image, both constructionist and deconstructionist, both space as deep as a room and surface as flat as a mirror. And amazingly, these conjunctions produce not a dissonant mess but a harmonious whole–a harmony that contains suggestions of constant change. Throughout this work there is a sense of the fluidity of solid things, suggesting the fragility of seemingly solid social structures, of the whole bourgeois edifice within which Morisot lived her life (and often found contentment). There is also an intimation of the artificial, constructed nature of our lives. What is this woman doing, after all, but constructing a persona for public view, putting on a social mask? Morisot keeps it all in play and brings the work to completion in a kind of dynamic suspension. Constantly in a state of formation and dissolution, this painting is like a wave forever approaching and receding, never quite breaking against the shore.