The Dark Side of French Bohemian Life at the Turn of the Century: Tea and Morphine: Women in Paris, 1880 - 1914

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

When we think of female images in 19th-century painting, the first to come to mind is the imposing matrons Mary Cassatt, spending leisure hours over a cup of tea or enjoying an afternoon exercise. But much darker scenes from the life of those women for whom such a concept as "leisure hours" did not exist at all appeared in abundance on the canvases of artists.

Drugs, prostitution, alcoholism - this is what constituted the harsh reality of women in the paintings of many French artists of that period. At least those who set themselves the task of showing the unsightly underside of "fin-de-siècle" - the period of the cultural revolution of the late nineteenth century.

The exhibition Tea and Morphine: Women in Paris, 1880 to 1914 creates a multidimensional image of Parisian women at the turn of the century, which encompasses both the lace collars of the upper class and the dirty syringes of the desperate. the poor. This great era elevated the figure of the artist and, in general, the fine arts to a completely new status, but at the same time led to deep social and cultural upheavals, leaving behind thousands of men and women desperately clinging to the elusive life and common sense.

In the painting by George Bottini "Sagot's Lithography Gallery", women in corsets and hats with feathers, coquettishly akimbo, look at the novelties in an art shop window. At the other end of the social ladder is The Morphine Addict (Eugene Grasset), a fragile girl in an undershirt, with a grimace of pain on her face, thrusting a needle into her thigh.

Some paintings are deliberately devoid of all signs of class affiliation. For example, "The Silence" by Henri Jean Guillaume Martin ("The Silence", Henri Jean Guillaume Martin) depicts a ghostly beauty in a crown of thorns, apparently existing outside the real world with its material fetters.

Despite the significant thematic diversity, stylistically the exhibition is quite homogeneous. It doesn't matter who is in the portrait, a disembodied nymph or a vicious seductress, a girl from high society who goes out into the world for the first time, or an indigent morphine addict - all female images are idealized and stylized to the limit. No matter how dark the sufferings of the heroines may be, this is a tragedy in its ancient understanding - theatrical, pretentious and aestheticized.

Tea and Morphine includes 100 works by many famous artists, including Edgar Degas, Odilon Redon, Mary Cassatt, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec and many others. In addition to paintings and reproductions, the exhibition will feature rare books, menus and theater posters that reflect the spirit of this raging, controversial era.

The influence of the artistic aesthetics of the Pre-Raphaelites and Impressionists on the work of the next generations is so great that it is basically impossible to overestimate it. Moreover, this applies not only to painting, but also to all other genres of art. For example, he can be easily spotted in the famous photographer David Hamilton.