Julie Manet and her Nurse

~IN AN ARTICLE PUBLISHED in February 1893 in the Journal des femmes artistes, Mme Bertaux pointed to what she saw as the two major charges which critics levelled against the works on...

Self-conscious modernity, the search for novelty (nouveauté), could be signalled by artists’ emphasis on the tactile materiality of their paint surfaces. By stressing the optical engagement of the spectator – whether in subtle nuances of tone and simultaneous contrasts of hue, in bravura brushwork or in the textural complexity of the paint layer – they alerted their...