Research Paper on "Berthe Morisot, the Basket Chair, (1885)"

Research Paper 5 pages (1683 words) Sources: 5

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Berthe Morisot, The Basket Chair, (1885) and Gustave Caillebotte, the Orange Trees, (1878); Discussion of visual relationship between modernism, class, and gender in both paintings as well as between formal characteristics and subject matter.

The Orange Trees was painted in 1878. The Basket Chair was painted in 1885. There is a decade and a continental change between the two, yet there is a world of difference between the style, empathies of painting, and subject matter, as well as form of painting itself.

The Orange Trees places the man squarely in the foreground. It is his figure that is the center of our attention and his back is towards us. Could that have nay meaning? As thoguh in a condescending way, it us the man who is at leisure, blase to the world, leisurely, one foot over knee, casually reading his newspaper. The man, too, is of the privileged, lorded upper class, White, and likely the master of the household. In the background, stands his Asian servant inferior, according to cultural values, in both culture and gender. She stands at a distance to us, seemingly less important than the man. Her figure is more occluded and she seems to be preoccupied in some task; what it is exactly that she is doing seems t o be unclear. Still further behind, lolling by the garden path is a dog.

The entire scene depicts a lazy warm day in some wealthy man's garden, his servant working for him, he reading, his dog sleeping. The leading of man to servant to dog each smaller in perspective than the other, may lead a modern person to infuse the picture with feminist and culture-bound interpretation and conclude that the painter's intent was to indicate a hierarchical declension of social status or level. Master comes first -- he is bold and abrasive in the foreground, treating even us with disdain with his back towards us. Servant and woman comes next, standing bending over some task. Dog comes last, inert, sleeping by the wayside.

In a different style and with accentuation reversed is The Basket Chair painted more than a decade later. The child is in the foreground of the picture, her bold look staring you in the face daring you to challenge her. Behind her and less clear is a sleeping woman. In front of the child is a watering can. May this be an allusion to the importance and focus on watering childhood so that it flourishes, just as the rich and flourishing garden behind the child flourishes?

Values have changed. Instead of the man who usurps cultural attention and is the center of the Victorian home and milieu, focus has now transferred to child. And this child doesn't stand with her back to you. She stares you squarely in the face demanding all of your attention. It is the adult who sleeps. The child is awake. Note too, as an aside, that both are female.

There is a difference in the appearance of the gardens too. In Caillebotte, "the Orange Trees," the garden is pruned and manicured with trees still, hardly, if at all, swaying in the breeze, and the flowers negligible spots in a tightly collected corner. Purpose, order, orderliness are demonstrated here with each relegated to its particular class and status and each categorized and pegged coordinately. Each has its status and class as well as 'corner' in life. And all, from tables and chairs to clothes of man and enclosures of trees is brilliantly, unnaturally polished and sparkling white. Rigidity, inflexibility, order, and recognition of 'necessary place' is the motif here. Certain expectations are put in place and the varnished, tidy brushwork reflects this.

The wildness of the Basket Chair, on the other hand, relays a different theme. Life wild, disorderly, alive in its undeveloped -- developing stage. In contradistinction to 'the Orange Trees' that seemed to bespoke a finished stage of development and inertia, the ' Basket Chair' indicates that life is a continuance of growth and cannot be tidy for it is never finished. The flowers are growing into roses, just as the child is maturing. Some of the roses are overly mature; they will die. Child will grow into woman who is in background, and growing as roses and as other foliage in the garden does, will, too, in time die. But the focus, on the moment, is on growth. The painting is wild and scrambled, with vigor and growth being the motif of the scene. After all, life is unclear. It is in constant flux and progress of change.

Ethnicities are mixed here too, no specific culture leveraged above the other. The woman, unconcerned and at peace, is Asian. The child, maybe her keep, is white and Anglo-Saxon.

The Orange Trees portrayed the Asian woman subservient to the White man in that it placed her as secondary appetence to his furnishings: the Victorian furniture, the Western designed garden; the dog -- an ordinate part of Victorian man.

The Basket Chair, on the other hand, places White girl in Asian environment thereby implying equality between cultures. No one cultures is superior to the other. The basket, a symbol of Asian culture looms higher than the girl. Dominant scenes are childhood, development, and ethnicity and these seem to be the areas of focus that the author wishes to draw our attention to.

The style in the painting is different too. Although both are impressionist, Caillebotte's touch is a combination of right realist technique, photographic in texture with, in a linear perspective, fading into an abstract structure. The furnishing and the man seem to have the inflexible, glossy photographic quality. The woman, on the other hand, of the undefined, indistinguishable 'other' class, is illustrated in abstract style.

There is a slow rapid diminution of size and stretching of space as well as a transparency that is missing in the Basket Chair. This transparency and orderliness is reinforced by an effected repetitive cadence of distinct and similar elements, such as the boxes enclosing the trees (and note that all is consciously and subconsciously enclosed in this picture, all as thoguh it were confined in its appropriate space). The picture possesses a tension between apparent -- not real; everything is superficial and constrained -- spontaneity and between an arrested cyclical time sense. The brushwork in the Basket Chair, on the other hand, is awash with continuance and energy. The foliage is allowed to grow; the child is permitted to stare; trees are allowed to grow wild. The entire scene is of unrestrained growth and nature in its truest, wildest sense. Perhaps the sole commonality we have between the two paintings is (aside from mingling of cultures) the sense of repose. And yet, whilst repose (and a superficial constrained one at that) is manifest in both scenes, the repose in the Basket Chair breathes more vitality and vigor than that in the Orange Trees. The latter seems constrained and forced; repose in the former seems more healthy, alert, and content. It may be due to the fact that the first is painted in a style that shows more hard contours and rigid axes, whilst the other breaks free of symmetry and formal structures showing deceptively impulsive brushwork and vigor in stroke.

Caillebotte's image indicates modern masculinity with focused attention on the assertive masculinity of the figure of the man in the foreground, back turned towards us. In fact, as Terry Smith (2006) writes, "it was in the context of bourgeois construction of masculinity that Gustave Caillebotte had been formed and it was through the image of that class and gender identity that he described an aspect of his own subjectivity" (p.58). This was often expressed by male figures, distracted and detached, as in the Orange Tree, who were witnesses to a scene.… READ MORE

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