As art historian Paul Tucker emphasizes, the period of the 1880s represented a crisis for the original circle of Impressionists. The younger generation, including Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, and painters with different goals, including Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin, raised new questions about the aspirations and practices of the visual arts. So what should the older generation, Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Claude Monet, do next? Degas, who continued to exhibit with the Impressionists, began closer investigations of the female body with what some call the “keyhole series,” where he depicted women bathing, dressing and stretching in less than flattering positions. Renoir traveled to Italy and Algeria in seek of classical subjects and returned, inspired by the paintings of Raphael, to make a modern classic depicting the female nude in an Arcadian landscape. After 1880, Monet distanced himself from the Impressionist exhibitions and instead entered his works into the Salon. Yet he maintained his commitment to the goals of Impressionist landscape painters, with emphasis on climate and landforms, on how weather and position of the sun affected perceptions of subject. Beginning in the 1880s, he began to experiment with series of the same subject, first of the coast of Belle-Île, then famously his series of haystacks, Rouen Cathedral, and views of his garden and the famous footbridge and water lilies at Giverny. Mary Cassatt, in contrast, is less concerned with the depiction of light, and not at all in landscape. Increasingly experimental as a printmaker, this is also a period where she emphasizes the identity and personhood of females, whether they be depicted on canvases or involved in the arts as painters or collectors. Her now missing mural of the “Modern Woman,” commissioned for the Women’s Buildings at the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exhibition marks a turning point in her role as artist, advocate and agent for modern art and for modern women.
Mary Cassatt. Modern Woman, Tympanum Woman’s Building. 1893 (now missing). Harper’s Engraving.
Edgar Degas. Woman Drying Her Foot. 1886. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436172
Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Caryatids, c. 1910. https://collection.barnesfoundation.org/objects/7012/Caryatids-(Cariatides)-also-called-Deux-baigneuses-(panneau-decoratif)/
Claude Monet, Woman with a Parasol Facing Left, 1886. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Claude_Monet_023.jpg
