Consuming Painting

In Consuming Painting, Allison Deutsch challenges the pervasive view that Impressionism was above all about visual experience. Focusing on the language of food and consumption as they were used by such prominent critics as Baudelaire and Zola, she writes new histories for familiar works by Manet, Monet, Caillebotte, and Pissarro and creates fresh possibilities for experiencing and interpreting them.

Examining the culinary metaphors that the most influential critics used to express their attraction or disgust toward painting, Deutsch rethinks French modern-life painting in relation to the visceral reactions that these works evoked in their earliest publics. Writers posed viewing as analogous to ingestion and used comparisons to food to describe the appearance of paint and the painter’s process. The food metaphors they chose were aligned with specific female types, such as red meat for sexualized female flesh, confections for fashionably made-up women, and hearty vegetables for agricultural laborers. These culinary figures of speech, Deutsch argues, provide important insights into both the fabrication of the feminine and the construction of masculinity in nineteenth-century France. Consuming Painting exposes the social politics at stake in the deeply gendered metaphors of sense and sensation.

Original and convincing, Consuming Painting upends traditional narratives of the sensory reception of modern painting. This trailblazing book is essential reading for specialists in nineteenth-century art and criticism, gender studies, and modernism.

“Consuming Painting offers an impressive new take on the history of late nineteenth-century French art, one that makes clear for the first time the sensorial range in the historical reception of modern painting. In her reevaluation and retranslation of art criticism, combined with her highly persuasive descriptions of a range of paintings, Deutsch shows the sustained discourse of desire and disgust built into the deeply gendered metaphorics of painting as culinary consumption.”—Marnin Young, author of Realism in the Age of Impressionism: Painting and the Politics of Time

“While some of the art criticism addressed in Consuming Painting is well known to scholars of Impressionism, Deutsch presents it in a completely new way, showing how art criticism addressed—and often highlighted—the haptic, gustatory, and olfactory aspects of paintings. A smart and promising book.”—Mary Hunter, author of The Face of Medicine: Visualising Medical Masculinities in Late Nineteenth-Century Paris

“Contributing to the existing scholarship on the feminization of Impressionism, Deutsch reconstructs the gendering of these food-based references as female for being rooted in bodily experience, fashion, and consumption.”—A. Luxenberg, Choice

Allison Deutsch is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London.

Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1. Metaphor and Materiality in Nineteenth-Century Art Criticism

Chapter 2. The Flesh of Painting

Chapter 3. The Confected Canvas

Chapter 4. Impressionist Market Gardener

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Download a PDF sample chapter here: Introduction

Art History & Architecture

           European

           Nineteenth-century

           Art Theory & Criticism

Literary Studies

           Romance Studies