Pissarro's market women: The imagery of social relations in an industrial society.
Item
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Title
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Pissarro's market women: The imagery of social relations in an industrial society.
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Identifier
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AAI9306142
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identifier
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9306142
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Creator
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Wein, Jo Ann G.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Linda Nochlin
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Date
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1990
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Fine Arts | Women's Studies | Biography
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Abstract
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In the early 1880's Camille Pissarro undertook a systematic study of the market and market women. They are scenes which display a distinct departure from his previous work. Whereas previously, in landscape Impressionism, figures had been small, and were integrated with the background, in the market paintings, figures were large, and were situated to the front of pictorial space.;Begun soon after his collaboration with Edgar Degas on a new periodical of prints, Le Jour et La Nuit, the market paintings exhibit compositional and figural affinities with Degas's paintings of the working women of Paris. Traditionally, art historians have viewed Pissarro as the most conservative painter of the Impressionist group, citing in this respect his prediliction for scenes of the rural peasantry and noting his sources in the work of Jean Francois Millet. It is incontestable, however, that scenes of the market and market women engaged in dialogue with modernity, to actively create meaning on contemporary issues of women, work, class, and political order.;This study focuses on these issues, in a discussion of the discourse that surrounded the place of the working woman in industrializing France in the last decades of the nineteenth century. It finds that the market paintings are influenced by Pissarro's political radicalism, as well as by social class and sex.;In the Revolution of 1789, market women led the march on Versailles to demand bread. In 1848 and 1871 workers' revolutions had threatened to overthrow existing aristocratic and bourgeois controlled governments. In the 1880s the image of the aggressive and potentially violent market woman was still strong in popular art and literature. In contrast, Pissarro imaged market women as self-sufficient and serious. Employing the revolutionary style of Impressionism, he called attention, in his paintings, to the importance of markets and market women in the economic life of France. Influenced by Pierre Kropotkin, the intellectual leader of French anarchism, Pissarro's market scenes in the context of their time, implied an anarchist alternative to capitalist economic systems.;Thus they were distinctive images of modernity in an expanding industrial economy, signifying social and economic unity in contrast to the concept of a nineteenth-century dichotomy between country and town.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy Restricted.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.