Imagendering II

21      Male artists, by contrast, very often portrayed women in such a manner as to question the naturalized power structures of the gaze. Women look out of the paintings at the observer in a vulnerable, or provocative or otherwise disturbing manner, promoting feelings of discomfort and denying an easy comfortable voyeuristic pleasure. Manet, who was a target for numerous jibes and ridicule by the press because of break with good taste in "Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe" was an artist whose figurative painting is full of problematic and irritating gazes. His pubescent prostitute "Olympia" returns the gaze in a calculated exchange reflecting the nexus of desire and commodity, and other solitary women avert their eyes in way which emphasizes the intrusion of a male onlooker. The complicated viewing situation depicted between a bar maid and a male customer in the mirror in "La bar aux Folies Bergères" has puzzled generations of art critics. A disrupted visual communication is most obvious in Manet's portraits of couples, all of which present a moment of alienation between male and female. Manet set the example for later painters' deliberate reflection on the representation of women in revised power structures of viewing (Armstrong 225).

22      A gaze returned from the objet d'art became a disturbing feature used by advanced artists to signify an asymmetry in the relation between observer and perceived subject and to draw attention to a new order of participation of the recipient in the construction of meaning of a piece of visual representation. In 1856 already Samuel Carter-Hall's Art Journal, the very voice of the conservative Victorian art establishment, had called Millais's "Autumn Leaves" "a significant vulgarism" because "the principle figure looks out of the picture at the spectator" (18:1856, 17, Landow). The gaze from the painted girl was perhaps interpreted as unnecessarily assured and unsuitably reminiscent of either an aristocratic tradition or of a courtesan impertinence. However much these women are safely confined within the picture frame as well as within a traditional portrait iconology, the representation of their gaze beyond the frame and at the beholder directed undue attention outside their assigned domestic and private sphere and hinted at a transgression of a prescribed modesty of behaviour.

23     The most well-known and important artistic mediators of impressionist techniques in England were the Americans James MacNeill Whistler (1834-1903) and John Singer Sargent (1856-1925). Whistler was by far the more controversial personality. As a reaction to John Ruskin's statement that one of his pictures was "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face" he took the famous art sage to court for libel. Whistler used the courtroom as a platform to make provocative and witty pronouncements in favour of his l'art pour l'art ideas, and achieved considerable notoriety through his aphorisms and witticisms. The painting which had incited Ruskin's scorn, "The Falling Rocket," showed a cascade of fireworks against a velvet night sky in motley daubs and patches. Its dissolution of conventional pictorial space into a confusion of scattered fragments seemed lacking in referentiality. Whistler gave his portraits of people, e.g. his mother, confusing titles like "symphony" and "harmony" to emphasize the formal compositional features, their rhythmical affinity to music, instead of content. His naming of portraits, even if these depicted close relatives, thus denied the mimesis and foregrounded formal aspects.

24     Like Whistler, John Sargent was a successful artist at the fin de siècle, a period called "the second consumer revolution," in which an increased emphasis on feminine refinement and upper class purchasing power and penchant for luxury overlapped (Lubar 11). Middle-class self-representation was an obsessive goal of conspicuous consumption; especially wives and daughters in domestic and society settings were a favourite of art commissions. Sargent willingly supplied these images of femininity gaining a reputation for beautifully executed and psychologically perceptive portraiture with a certain surplus of daring frisson. He is now generally held to have remained committed to upper class, conservative values, flattering the nouveaux riches with glossy pictures of their attractive wives. At the same time, he achieved something like a theatrical redefinition of female self-fashioning. Sargent shared a popular fascination with the theatre at this period, which had inspired his famous painting of Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth. But the influence of the theatre extended beyond his portraits of actors. The bright lights which make ordinary figures stand out from a dark background hint at the footlights of a stage. The persons portrayed are offered as a spectacle of ostentatious display to the viewer, not only because of their affected poses and dramatic illumination but primarily because they are surrounded by slightly distorted and impenetrable spaces.

25     This lack of equilibrium in his portraits was noted by many contemporary critics and was the subject of disparaging caricature. In the beginning of his career his odd angles and abrupt foreshortenings were held to be his particular failing (Hills 170). But around the turn of the century the often precarious poses came to be seen as excitingly apt, "these creatures vibrate with the nervous tension of the age" (Hills 171). Unsettled pictorial spaces were increasingly interpreted as a successful expression of fleeting moments of heightened psychological significance (Kilmurray/ Ormond 36). The idea that life can be improved by seeking as many hedonistic moments of elevated experience as possible, "getting as many pulsations as possible" (237) would have been familiar from Walter Pater's famous conclusion to The Renaissance.