Katherine Keenum

My Christmas gift to myself this year was the exhibition catalogue for the show Berthe Morisot: Woman Impressionist, which is at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia until January 14, 2019. From there it will travel to the Dallas Museum of Art and on to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. If you can, go see it!

I was alerted to the exhibition by Peter Schjeldahl’s review in The New Yorker. In one paragraph that struck me especially, he says that half the works in the show remain in private hands, and of these, most are museum-worthy. That is certainly true of this example, Young Girl with Doll. I’d love to see the actual brushwork, but even if I don’t, the reproductions in the catalogue are of a high quality.

Morisot was at the center of the Impressionist group of artists; yet partly because so little of her work was handled by galleries or bought by French museums in her lifetime, the quality and influence of her work has been underestimated. Here’s to new appreciation of women’s pasts and hope for our growing strength in the dangerous new year ahead!