How can an artist be both modern and a woman? Berthe Morisot struggled with this question as a founding member of the Impressionists in Paris in the 1870s. Nearly a century later, American painters Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan, and Joan Mitchell confronted the same challenge as prominent women among the Abstract Expressionists. Join art historian Daniel Belasco for a talk exploring Morisot’s life, art, and how the English publication of her revealing personal correspondence inspired a generation of American women artists in the 1950s.
Daniel Belasco is an art historian and Executive Director of the Al Held Foundation. He previously served as curator at the Dorsky Museum at SUNY New Paltz and The Jewish Museum, organizing monographic exhibitions of Bradley Walker Tomlin, Grace Hartigan, Mary Reid Kelley, and Dick Polich/Tallix Art Foundry, among other survey shows and projects.
Image: Berthe Morisot, The Artist's Sister at a Window (Portrait of Mme Pontillon or Young Woman at the Window),1869, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection, 1970.17.47, Photo courtesy of National Gallery of Art