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(piano playing)
Dr. Zucker: We're in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
We're looking at a really fantastic canvas by Bert Morisot,
one of the great impressionist painters, a woman who was not the only painter involved in this canvas.
Dr. Harris: Apparently not, apparently Manet, who was her brother-in-law,
came over one day and felt quite at liberty to paint over areas of the canvas.
Dr. Zucker: What's what.
Dr. Harris: At least to us.
Dr. Zucker: Apparently she was not happy about it.
Dr. Harris: No.
Dr. Harris: Presumptuous.
Dr. Zucker: It says something about gender relations at the time ...
Dr. Zucker: ... and what it meant for a woman to be a painter.
Dr. Harris: Of course, typically for a woman impressionist artist,
we have an interior domestic scene.
Dr. Zucker: In fact, this is the artists mother and sister.
Dr. Harris: It would have been very difficult for a woman artist at this time,
unlike her male counterparts to be in bars painting some cabaret scenes
Dr. Zucker: Absolutely inappropriate ...
Dr. Harris: ... or street scenes, right.
Dr. Harris: So we get these ...
Dr. Harris: Exactly, so get these interior scenes and people who are her family as her models.
Dr. Zucker: The women are doing what women would be expected to spend their time doing,
Dr. Harris: Embroidery, right.
Dr. Zucker: Absolutely.
We're seeing a really luscious interior.
Dr. Harris: It's sad, the woman in the center looks sad to me.
Dr. Zucker: And trapped.
Dr. Zucker: ... in that social space.
Dr. Harris: The woman in the foreground, her mother,
it looks as though she's in mourning in this black dress.
Not that I think the painting is about mourning or anything,
it's clearly of a modern Parisian interior,
but it's hard not to see something about women's domestic life here
and the sense of entrapment, at least for me, as a viewer in the early 21st Century.
Dr. Zucker: That sense is heightened by the fact that it's painted by the younger woman's sister
who's in a sense trying to find a way out and is confronting all of those expectations
and what that means, which I think is an enormously complex and difficult path for her to have taken.
Dr. Harris: Actually, if I remember correctly, both Bert and her sister took painting lessons.
It was only Bert who went on to pursue art as a career
and her sister who got married and had children.
Dr. Zucker: You step back.
Dr. Harris: It's hard not to read some of those things into this.
Dr. Zucker: It is.
The canvas itself is beautifully handled,
incredibly lush, and there's a kind of openness and a kind of willingness to risk
Dr. Harris: Yeah.
Dr. Zucker: ... that I think is quite extraordinary for this period.
Dr. Harris: It is.
Dr. Harris: Four years.
Dr. Zucker: ... four to five years before the first impressionist exhibition
and already we see an artist who is really fulfilling some of the most important aspects
Dr. Harris: Of the impressionist moment.
Dr. Zucker: ... as impressionism.
I don't want to say fulfilling, but I want to say actually, in a sense, leading that charge.
Dr. Harris: You can see areas where the contours are open.
Things look unfinished, look at the mother's right hand for example.
This had a kind of radical unfinished quality.
Dr. Zucker: There are passages that are incredibly abstract.
If you look at the negative space on the lower left that it's just inside the leg of the table,
it's just this beautiful, purely abstract form.
Dr. Harris: Pinks and purples, it's lovely.
Dr. Zucker: Absolutely, it's really just about color and form.
I think there are passages like that throughout.
Her willingness to use grey's, her attention to the tone here is really quite extraordinary.
Dr. Harris: The use of blues and purples and shadows, not modeling in the normal tonal way.
Dr. Zucker: I have to say that when I look at Morisot's,
I am almost always overwhelmed by her bravery.
Dr. Harris: Yeah.
Dr. Zucker: Not only because of what she was accomplishing as a woman,
but literally just because of the way in which she is willing to handle her paint.
Dr. Harris: As a painter.
(piano playing)