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

Art historian Ruth Iskin's rich and engaging study explores the relationship between impressionist painting and Parisian consumer culture, bringing together two scholarly fields whose fascinating parallels have never before benefited from such a comprehensive and insightful exploration. Iskin's impeccably researched book succeeds in casting a new light on some of the most iconic images of impressionist art by making visible what was most striking about these paintings to nineteenth-century viewers. Iskin does this in part by drawing on contemporary advertisements, caricatures and initial reviews. She reminds us that early critics often found that "paintings of modern life and cheap signs of consumer culture were all too closely connected" (8). The references to consumer culture in Caillebotte's gorgeous image of Haussmannized alienation, Paris, A Rainy Day, for example, are barely noticeable today. But in 1877, the multitude of umbrellas that appeared to have been "freshly taken from the racks" of a department store were visually jarring, threatening to overtake the people carrying them, as an initial critic noted (117-18); the clothing of the main couple was an all-too realistic study in luxury Parisian goods, right down to the woman's delicate earring. Degas's 1878 Café Singer (Singer with a Glove), to take another example, was mocked in Le Charivari as a veritable advertisement for the dark glove in its foreground, a bourgeois accessory popularized by department stores with mammoth glove departments. And the opera glass in Mary Cassatt's In the Loge, also from 1878, already functioned as a figure for female visual agency in fashion plates from earlier in the century.

Iskin's study explores the complex ways in which painters like Caillebotte, Degas, Cassatt and many others engaged with and were deeply influenced by consumer culture, as she deftly resituates many of these familiar paintings in their initial visual context. With over ninety images, about half of which are of posters and advertisements, the book allows readers to pore over these striking references ourselves; the visual connections are in themselves nothing short of captivating. Beyond this, we have Iskin's own incisive analysis, as she ably moves between readings of Baudelaire and Zola (and not just the expected choices of Le Peintre de la vie moderne and Au Bonheur des dames, but also Baudelaire's "A une passante," and Zola's L'Œuvre, Le Ventre de Paris and art criticism); Walter Benjamin, and the impressionist canon.

Iskin's work is focused in part on the role of "modern women" in consumer culture and impressionism, and her investigation offers a nuanced perspective of late nineteenth-century representations of femininity by displacing the binaristic structure of "male gaze" upon female object. In part because of women's key role in consumer culture, impressionist painters depicted women as participating in modern life, and many paintings "depict modern women as subjects whose gazes were represented and addressed" (23). Iskin proposes that some paintings "represent multiple points of view," allowing for a plurality of gazes within a single work. This argument guides her reading of Manet's Bar at the Folies-Bergère, the subject of her second chapter (which follows an extensive introductory chapter that lays out many of the questions she will explore in the book). According to Iskin, recognizing that there are "several points of spectatorial identification in [Manet's] painting: the male customer in the mirror, the woman looking through the opera glass, and the crowd looking at the spectacle" accounts for the widely discussed spatial "incoherence" attributed to Manet's painting, seen through the disjunction between the mirror and its reflection. Iskin reads Manet's painting as marking "a shift in pictorial codes of representation from an exclusive male gaze [. . .] to a new paradigm of crowd spectatorship" (55) one that resembles Baudelaire's own description of the flâneur as "a mirror as vast as the crowd itself." As in all of her chapters, Iskin's reading draws on a wide variety of sources. In...