In the Suburbs

Adriana:  The Banlieu

Berthe Morisot’s View of Paris from the Trocadero, 1872 is an oil on canvas painting that presents a barrier that separates the space between middle-class suburban women from the women of the city.

This shows us how access was denied to middle-class suburban women to the city in order to prevail the bourgeois cultural ideology. You can see such thing in the painting by how the fence is separating the middle-class suburban women from the city. The two women on the painting have their backs to the city showing no interest towards the city. Also, opposing the two women, you have a little girl facing the city as if she was interested in what was behind the fence. This picture is a perfect representation of how middle-class and the bourgeois were divided, they were separated by social class and how the suburban women were constrained to such environment.

 On the other hand, one of the other paintings I choose is Berthe Morisot, The Wet Nurse Angele with Julie Manet, 1880 which serves as a kind of domestic interior representation of women and it also represents a women raising a child. The controversy in the painting is that the women nursing the baby is a wet nurse and not the mother of the child. In this case, the nurse was hired to feed the child while the artist who was the mother, painted a scene of a working woman. A wet nurse was used in order for the mother of the child to work freely, in such cases back in France the wet nurses were used by working women not by the bourgeois.



Another painting that I choose was Camille Pissarro, The Seine at Port-Marly, 1872 which represents the suburban side of the country with symbols of industrialization. This is very interesting because you can see how the suburban side of the country was used for industrial and the people working there were probably from the suburbs. Which brings us to another painting I choose which is Edouard Manet's, Boating, 1874 that represents how people from the city enjoyed going to the country side as recreation. In the painting you have two upper class people enjoying boating in a summer day. This picture represents outdoor leisure that people from upper class enjoyed and used as a retreat from the city.

As an opposite of Edouard Manet's, Boating, 1874; Auguste Renoir's, Oarsmen at Chatou, oil on canvas, 1879 represents a more relaxed recreation than the other painting.
 
This painting represents sailors enjoying the sun and the summer day. Berthe Morisot, A Summer’s Day, 1879, oil on canvas unlike Auguste Renoir's, Oarsmen at Chatou 1879 is similar to Edouard Manet's, Boating, 1874 because the painting represents middle-class women in a moment of relaxation, enjoying a quiet thought away from the city.

 

 

References

Art, National Gallery of. National Gallery of Art. 2015. 21 November 2015.

Art, The Metropolitan Museum of. The Metropolitan Museum of Art . 2000-2015. 21 November 2015.

Gallery, The National. Impressionism . 2012. 21 November 2015.

+++++

A terrific paper on the origin of the banlieue.



Nicholas Mirzoeff  Visualizing the Anthropocene   (short version)

from the longer essay:

"There is no modern Western painting more widely reproduced and taught than Claude
Monet’s 1873 Impression: Sun Rising. In supplementary addition to
the standard appreciation of Monet’s handling of color and light, I want to stress
here that this is a painting that at once reveals and aestheticizes anthropogenic
environmental destruction. Coming late to the Industrial Revolution, France was
just experiencing the smog produced by industrial coal use. The smokiness of the
port of Le Havre in Normandy, seen in Monet’s picture, was a feature of French
visual culture from popular photographs and paintings from the middle of the
nineteenth century to Maurice de Vlaminck’s 1907 painting Le Havre, les bassins.
Monet grew up in Le Havre, which had become the main French port for transatlantic passenger shipping, predominantly steamship traffic. While traditional
rowing boats can be seen in the foreground, the background is dominated
by industrial machinery, such as the cranes to the right, and its by- products. Coal
smoke pours forth from the smokestacks of the steamers clearly depicted at the
left middle ground of the painting. It generates the set of sense impressions that
gave first this painting, and then an entire movement, its name. Coal smoke is yellow,
the yellow that predominates at the top of the painting. In the early morning,
it encounters the blue morning light and the red of the rising sun, producing the
array of refracted color that makes Monet’s painting so stunning.
        There is a good deal of artfulness in Monet’s apparently spontaneous effort to
seize the moment. In the words of Paul Hayes Tucker (1995: 74), doyen of Monet
scholars, the mix of light and smoke combines to “create a kind of beauty that is
both surprising and seductive.” Indeed, the steamers can barely be distinguished
in the smog, giving them the appearance of factory smokestacks, somehow emerging
from the water like a latter- day Leviathan. The painting is constructed from
an unusually high viewpoint.  If we are seeking to give a literal account, perhaps
Monet was looking out of a high window or from the rigging of a ship. Whether
he physically positioned himself at such a place is perhaps beside the point. Monet
visualized the “seductiveness” mentioned by Tucker as the conquest of nature,
blending the once- threatening seascape into a domesticated and human- dominated
object of contemplation. Here the human agents of the Anthropocene look at their
creation from its own viewpoint, as it were, and see that it was good. While some
of Monet’s contemporaries at first experienced his depiction as a modernist shock,
it soon became comfortably familiar, as it remains today. The painting makes
the circulation of capital and the modern visible and sayable as Anthropocene
(an)aesthetics. Whereas the material smog was a dangerous by- product, this modern
aesthetic countered it by transforming the very perception of its difference into
a sign of human superiority and the continuing conquest of nature.
      

Two years later, Monet fully visualized this cosmology in his small but dense
painting Unloading Coal. A fleet of coal barges from the mines in the
north invade the picture space from the bottom left to the right middle ground.
The product of this primary extraction is carried off the barges by workers who
cannot be distinguished individually, precisely because as individuals they do
not matter. What counts is the unloading of the coal. From here, the coal is transported
by means we cannot see to factories like the one in the background, once
again pouring smoke. In those factories are produced the modern iron bridge
and the commodities being transported by the carts across it. A gaslight, the literal
visible sign of human dominance over nature, can just be made out on the bridge. The bridge is visibly a “higher” level of existence, one dominated by commodities
and artificially lit. The figures are no more distinct or individualized up
there, even though some are at rest or watching the underlings carry coal, so you
would rather be one of them. The two spaces of phantasmagoria — production
and consumption — are linked into one visualized system here. It is given coherence
by the overall warm tone of the painting, that subdued yellow hue, which
is the product of coal smoke. The degradation of the air is seen as natural, right,
and hence aesthetic, a key step in any visuality: it produces an anaesthetic to the
actual physical conditions. The Anthropocene is so built in to our senses that it
determines our perceptions, hence it is aesthetic. Just as with Impression a few
years earlier, Unloading Coal is constructed from an unusual midair viewpoint,
interpreted by Richard Thomson (2010: 123) as being the view from the window
of a train as it crossed over the river Seine between Argenteuil and Paris. If we
take this literally mapped view, Monet turned the moving image seen from his
train, often taken to be the precursor of cinema, into a still This freeze- frame accounts for the strong sense of movement and circulation in the painting. At a metaphorical level, it once again represents the Anthropocene’s visualization of itself and its aesthetic anaesthesia of the senses. "

Nicholas Mirzoeff, "Visualizing the Anthropocene"  Public Culture