Modern Women and Parisian Consumer Culture in Impressionist Painting (review)

In the much traversed terrain of Impressionism, scholars have overlooked a critical component of the ‘painting of modern life’: the role of consumer culture in its development and reception. So Iskin argues in her provocative book, which proposes a crucial interplay between the Parisian visual culture of consumption, avant-garde art practices and the figure of the modern woman in the paintings of Manet and the Impressionists. It seems that print media images such as fashion plates, illustrated department store catalogues and advertising posters, along with street signs, store fronts and other manifestations of the rampant marchandisement of Paris so saturated everyday life that this consumerism became enmeshed in the economies of avant-garde art production and spectatorship. Iskin uses the lens of consumerism to survey an assortment of subjects, including Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, the millinery paintings of Degas, the treatment of boulevards and cityscapes by various Impressionists, the market scenes of Caillebotte and Pissarro and finally the phenomenon of the chic Parisienne, as registered in high and low art. An important aspect of Iskin’s project is its reconsideration of women’s place within modernism and its representations. In contrast to much of the feminist scholarship devoted to this topic, which tends to emphasize the objectification and exclusion of women, this book posits that women were often presented as active agents in Impressionist paintings, and that in some instances, female viewers seem to have been a target audience. Such revisionist approaches are gaining traction, as evidenced by the catalogue essays accompanying two recent exhibitions on women and Impressionism, and Iskin’s advocacy for female agency and subjectivity as engendered in ‘consumerist’ Impressionist art is a significant enterprise. Particularly convincing are Iskin’s discussions on the intersections of commodity display and female spectatorship in Manet’s Bar, along with Degas’s suite of millinery works and their relationship to the spaces (literal and otherwise) of female fashion consumerism. The author’s exploration of lesser known paintings of urban and village marketplaces, which engage in notions of natural and artificial modes of display and consumption, is also noteworthy. There is an abundance of new material offered in this book and scholars will profit from the author’s assiduous research. That said, there were ambiguities as to the relationship between consumer culture and avant-garde art that at times left this reader wanting. Iskin’s conclusion that there were aspects of resistance, ambivalence and absorption vis-à-vis commodity culture in Impressionist art is convincing; however, the complexity of this dynamic is too often minimized in both its theoretical framings as well as in the analyses of several key paintings. Moreover, the inconsistent treatment of the subject of modern women — which is positioned as this study’s focus in the introduction and yet all but disappears in two of its six chapters —is a bit problematic. These criticisms aside, this ambitious and revisionist book is sure to generate reappraisals of the Impressionist movement, the œuvre of its individual artists and women’s place in the public sphere of the late nineteenth century.