Painting Spoiler Alert!!

The other day in my art history class, we had just moved past the French Realist movement and were centering in on the beginnings of impressionism.

For the last fifteen minutes of class, we were examining this painting:

It looked pretty nice to me.  Like a post card or the book cover to a Victorian rags-to-riches story.  What it communicated to me was something along these lines, “Oh, look at these wonderful hats!  Fluff, fluff, fluff!  I wonder what’s on The Bachelor tonight.  I hope that slut from Reno goes home.  Ay me!”

However, after fifteen minutes of lecture, I was told that such was not the case.

Instead, what this painting is actually communicating, is a commodified young girl who is susceptible to the penetrating male gaze of capitalist France.

In literary criticism, examining a piece of literature without any historical context, author’s biographic information, or ideology is part of New Criticism.  New Critics focus on works of poetry and prose as self-contained entities with meaning in themselves.

All of this commodification talk got me thinking… does a painting have inherent meaning?   If we don’t know the painter’s original intent, how do assess what the meaning is in the first place?

While I was sitting there, trying to take notes, all I could think to myself was, “I still think the colors and textures are pretty.  And that this woman is probably nice and sends money to her mom every weekend.”

I was also thinking that I needed some chocolate or something to cheer me up, because Marxism (along with many other -isms) often sucks the positive emotions out of my life like an ideological dementor.