The Painted Face: Portraits of Women in France, 1814-1914

by Tamar Garb

The meaning of a painted portrait and even its subject may be far more complex than expected, Tamar Garb reveals in this book. She charts for the first time the history of French female portraiture from its heyday in the early nineteenth century to its demise in the early twentieth century, showing how these paintings illuminate evolving social attitudes and aesthetic concerns in France over the course of the century.

 

The author builds the discussion around six canonic works by Ingres, Manet, Cassatt, Cézanne, Picasso, and Matisse, beginning with Ingres’s idealized portrait of Mme de Sennones and ending with Matisse’s elegiac last portrait of his wife. During the hundred years that separate these works, the female portrait went from being the ideal genre for the expression of painting’s capacity to describe and embellish “nature,” to the prime locus of its refusal to do so. Picasso’s Cubism, and specifically Ma Jolie, provides the fulcrum of this shift.

 

288 pages, Hardcover

First published September 26, 2007

Reviews

[Margaryta · Rating 3 out of 5]

Informative but not particularly captivating - I cannot think of another way to describe the reading experience for "The Painted Face." Garb's analysis of each of the six works is extensive but you can feel how each word comes after another. Rarely did I get lost in the discussion and feel like it flowed seamlessly. The chapter on Cezanne was especially dense, although that is largely because phenomenology continues to be something I struggle with comprehending.