I’m looking for astonishment, but I’m landing on contradictions. Holding all grocery bags over one arm. The way rings rest on fingers kneading clay. A mug held at a dinner party. The lather I encourage in the shower when I know later I’ll be meeting a friend, a different density than when I know my company for the night will only be me. The beige of a sweater one of my sisters always throws on last-minute, after agonizing over an outfit for hours before saying “fuck it, I’ll just wear this again.” A perfume an ex used to wear, how whenever I pass someone on the street and catch a scent close to it, I remember the spirals on the headboard she’d lean her head over when drying her hair after a shower, covered in its smell.

A choice made within a private space isn’t necessarily perceived as such by others. Is the decision to wear an old sweater, for example, or apply a particular perfume, a personal indulgence or an attempt to improve a first impression? I don’t want to place the people in my life inside a confessional, to capture their specificities as if their existence is a sin. I just find pleasure in poking holes in the reality we believe we live in, as if it’s a bubble.

Details are rather delicious.

Noting the ways in which singularity is impossible and multiplicity, while honest, is inherently contradictory, is a habit I’ve turned into a pastime of my own; not the point of view of those I observe. But when recording those details in essays such as this one, it feels important for me to ask myself: am I portraying people I know without betraying their subjectivity? How can I do this ethically and with reciprocity? In other words, how do I make sure that sharing their presence, even momentarily, is framed within the context of both revealing my perspective while reveling in their specificity as a moment of beauty? Beauty as in, sincerity. These kinds of questions are essential, when considering how a work of art is representing a moment in time; regardless of whether the moment itself is real or imaginary, but more so when the artist has relied on the actual presence of a body or bodies for inspiration. Otherwise, human beings at their center become instrumentalized, brutalized, turned into things. And in art, things are exactly what artists are trying to resist becoming themselves; so why treat others so?

Much of art considered noteworthy concerns itself with how humans inhabit nature or the so-called public sphere: at leisure, at work, at war. Of course, within the context of any scene, the artist’s point of view can be gleaned through their choice of style, form, content, and subject. There’s this proclivity in art history to regard most portrayals of humans as an homage, to consider depictions of conflict, struggle, joy, confusion, or devastation as inherently sympathetic, and an artist as a voice of sociopolitical conscience. Consider painters like Van Gogh, de Ribera, Goya, Ceruti, Monet, and many others who are revered for showing the lives of ordinary people. How often, though, is the subjectivity, the vulnerability of a person portrayed as suffering treated with respect, with individuality? And how often are the faces of the figures in their scenes abstracted, or reduced to a “type”?

Perhaps this tendency arises from the difficulty of asking someone in the midst of their day to stop and pose. For an artist who wishes to record the world around them through a stylized point of view, such a request reveals an artificiality in the desire to reconstruct the experience of another in a different medium. An acknowledgement that the documentation of “life” requires that life itself must stop so it can be recreated again could feel like an admission of one’s own frivolousness. Now, I don’t particularly feel that choosing to spend time documenting the world through the lens of personal experience is a frivolous, useless pastime. I’m more than infatuated with it, this obsession over singularity. Long ago I could have crushed my compulsion to focus on the color of sweaters, the tilt of a finger holding a mug, the twist of a lip in response to bad news. I even write these observations down, rather than go to work or talk to a friend in distress or shop for groceries, or anything else I do because I have to, because I live and love and eat. Yet, I can acknowledge that I find myself unsettled, when someone else interrupts—whether or not they ask for consent—to take a picture of me as I’m cooking, or record a conversation I’m having with a friend in a café, or stop me on the street on my way to a meeting. I’m not living my life for the sake of an image to be disseminated, to be credited to someone I barely know, in order to satisfy a narrative they’re constructing about their world. But am I not also complicit in latching onto details as if underneath their surfaces there are stories waiting to be revealed?

Berthe Marie Pauline Morisot was one of the founding members of Impressionism. Born in 1841 in Bourges, France to a wealthy bourgeois family, she was one of the “five or six lunatics” who exhibited their work in the first Salon de Refusés, the avant-garde response to works rejected by the infamous Salon de Paris in 1874. A participant in all subsequent shows through 1886 with the exception of the one following the birth of her only child, she’s considered by the art historian Paul Mantz as the “only one true Impressionist in the whole revolutionary group.” Critics at the time like Albert Wolff also regarded her as the most radical, abstract and distinctive artist of them all, an innovator of paintings primarily composed of women in scenes of domestic intimacy. Her canvases are always full of passionate, cacophonous brushstrokes in pastel tones, with the revelatory use of mise-en-scène that often renders their circumstances incomplete, as if to emphasize the impossibility of encapsulating reality through an image. Yet she’s barely celebrated in comparison with other artists at the time, including her brother-in-law Édouard Manet, as well as Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Claude Monet. The first U.S. retrospective of her work in 2018 was somewhat insultingly-subtitled “Woman Painter” as if her gender, as opposed to the inventiveness of her work, was her most distinctive characteristic. Claiming that paintings should “capture something that passes,” she herself wrote in her diary that “I like either extreme novelty or things of the past.”

Berthe and as her sister Edma both received private tutelage in the arts during their privileged upbringing, even as they were prevented from accessing a formal arts education. They both studied under the painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, eventually working at the Louvre as copyists. Edma gave up her practice in order to marry a naval officer, while Morisot continued to work at the museum, where she soon met and befriended Édouard Manet. It’s suspected that they might have been in love, though it’s difficult to imagine how they could’ve lived and remained affectionate until he passed away, given that she soon married his brother, Eugène. Perhaps they had an affair, perhaps not. Regardless, three of her paintings hung in his bedroom until his death and she frequently sat as his model, most famously in his work The Balcony (1868-1869).

It’s an unavoidable, tragic reality that the art most likely to survive the passage of time does so because a wealthy patron, usually a man but not always, decided at some point that it was worth preserving. Except of course, if the artists themselves were wealthy enough to archive their work on their own terms. Morisot  was such an artist. She had the means to sustain her own creative practice and could engage with her own ambitions rather than serve the tastes of those wealthy enough to purchase art. But, while her financial freedom afforded her the possibility to radically reinvent the practice of abstract portraiture, she never earned a reputation as notorious—both now and when she was alive—as her more-conventional contemporaries.

In art history, the portrayal of so-called domestic life often is analyzed as an act of reconfiguration and repair. But much of the time, scenes of such private spaces—the interiors and the clothing, the chairs and the fireplaces, the conversations between friends on a couch—are deemed tedious, shallow, and delicate.

For both the painter and the painted, the subject and the documentarian, the former lover and the songwriter, art can be a site of renewal. In art history, the portrayal of so-called domestic life often is analyzed as an act of reconfiguration and repair. But much of the time, scenes of such private spaces—the interiors and the clothing, the chairs and the fireplaces, the conversations between friends on a couch—are deemed tedious, shallow, and delicate. Feminine too, either because women have faced, for much of history, restrictions in public spaces or because patriarchy identified the home as a woman’s sole domain. In any case, art typically produced in domestic spaces, such as sewing, pottery, and flower arranging, were often deemed lesser or “decorative,” arts. And by extension, art depicting the domestic, saccharine.

In her essay Large Issues From Small, Claire-Louise Bennett writes of contemporary efforts:

Challenging the hegemony of fine art and its emphasis on beauty, religion and greatness, everyday aesthetics alert us to those myriad responses, from disgust to consummation, that calibrate our day-to-day environments and the activities they are host to. While this is a crucial and exciting turn, I feel that some of the artworks that have emerged from this discourse often present an estranged pastiche of ‘everyday life’, and reinforce generic ideas of the domestic. Too much of the human role is apparent in them, perhaps.

I wonder if the distinction between perpetuating pastiche and reconstituting the domestic into a site of revelation can be marked by sincerity or, as I described it earlier, beauty. Not beauty as it’s traditionally considered, in the sense of a stiff aesthetic mask, but as the emergence of an earnest point of view indulged in affirmatively.

The pop of veins under an arm holding too many grocery bags. The way fingers curve in a bend underneath rings popping out of wet clay. The bliss of hanging a lather-filled head of hair underneath a showerhead. The hug of a sweater with curly hair poking out of its edges, flickering in the night wind. The smell of a perfume applied long enough to blend with a body’s natural scent, but not too long for whiffs of it to nudge at me as I wander down a street. The moments when contradiction rears its head as honesty—when someone spends hours putting in effort to hide behind a veil but eventually declares, “fuck it, I’ll just be me again.”

Wandering through the first floor of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires last week, I passed by a painting I hadn’t noticed before, La coiffure by Berthe Morisot (1894).

In pastel tones, the background hazy, a young girl with dark hair in a fluffy white nightgown sits impatiently, her hands around the back of a chair. Behind her, an older woman in practical, outdoor clothing brushes her locks. This other woman, based on her outfit, as well as her lack of resemblance to the seated girl, is likely a servant, housekeeper, or nanny. In other words, of a lower social class. Yet within this scene there’s a painting on the wall behind the woman and girl. Faded and within a wide frame, it depicts another woman in an evening gown with hair the same color, in a similar style, as that of the standing woman. She’s surrounded by wildflowers. The face of the woman in this painting-within-a-painting isn’t visible, her likeness is rendered abstractly. Based on how she’s holding her head at an angle, she could be looking at the young girl with dark hair through the golden frame as if it’s a window. A ghost.

Or, does the painting represent an inner life, the hair brushing scene, a material one?

Every gaze is an inversion of a possibility to consider. The seated girl looks ahead, perhaps into a mirror as she waits for her hair to be twisted into a style. Much like way the fragmented background leaves its location ambiguous, the precise details of the interior of the room are abstruse. The woman holding the brush looks to the side. Tired, exasperated, or bored. The one in the painting appears to look into the room.

Is La coiffure proposing that in artifice, reality reveals itself as something beyond its surface?

What’s happening is nebulous. It is unclear whether this painting is reality, fantasy, or something in between or if the synchronicity between the hair colors, the buns, is nothing but pure coincidence. Morisot’s title means The hairstyle. The girl with the dark hair is on her way to one, but she’s not there yet. Her hair is being brushed for the sake of a future style. Maybe both of the “live” women are the primary subjects, as they’ll share the same look. Or perhaps it’s all three of them, including the one in the painting-within-a-painting. Regardless, Morisot challenges us to ask ourselves which figure we focus on first and what that says about our prejudices, our preferences, our habits, and our assumptions about the subjects we deem worthy. To question what may be hiding beneath the veneer of the domestic.

Morisot’s work is not an argument. Instead, it is an overlapping sequence of questions. No clear answer is offered by the painting, but her textured brush strokes in warm, soft tones offer clues as to how complex this setting is, how diaphanous its allegiance to hierarchies. Her distinctive use of abstraction to characterize the background of the scene is another pointed note. Rather than trying to represent a realistic moment, Morisot evokes an incongruous domiciliary world of ephemeral suggestions to dispute what might be considered fixed and controlled in the public sphere.

I used to think all good art was theft but recently, I’m not so sure.

Soon after I leave the museum in Buenos Aires to research more about Berthe Morisot’s work, I learn that the year after she made La coiffure, Edgar Degas created a painting with the same title. It features two women, one clearly younger with bright auburn hair. The entire painting is also in various shades of orange. The younger woman is sitting in a chair while her hair is being pulled back from behind by a woman with an updo, wearing the uniform of a servant. The painting implies that the seated figure is the one in power. As if to suggest that the rules of a private world would of course mimic those of the public, just in another shade. There’s no painting-in-a-painting in the back of Degas’ piece. Again, he painted this a year after Morisot’s, in 1895, with the same title, a blatant admission that he’s referencing, if not plagiarizing, her earlier creation. But rather than using her scene as inspiration to scrutinize class relations, or provide his own spin on her provocation, or unlock the vulnerabilities shared within an intimate space, he’s using two bodies of women as a canvas upon which to play with color. In the earlier words of Bennett, he’s presenting “an estranged pastiche of ‘everyday life’,” where subjects are turned into objects. Objects that satisfy a story he’s constructing about how he sees the world.

I’m more interested in revealing than in stealing. In the fracturing of reality enabled by shifts in point of view. For much of history, women painters were confined to the interior, prevented from accessing the public. This is now, in most of the world, not as true. Recognizing, of course, the potential for violence that lingers over every excursion of a femme body into the outside world. But I find that I tend to prefer to stay inside, and focus on details I observe away from public view, noting the discontinuities between how people seem to be and how they feel about who they are. It’s hard to catch without intimate knowledge of someone. And in some ways, it can be a violence to intrude. In its totality, the sum of our contradictions is ungraspable.

But I wonder, I still wonder, how I can get close.

It’s invasive to ask a stranger in the midst of their day to stop and pose, just for the sake of capturing their likeness. Even if I spot an idiosyncrasy that captivates me. At no moment does my own life feel less truthful than when I stop in the midst of my experience of it. The artificiality I exist in, when I sit down to record a detail, is an admission that the documentation of “life” requires life to become something else. I’m writing, rather than going to work or talking to a friend in distress or shopping for groceries, or anything else I do. I live and love and eat but when I step aside from it all, it’s insincere to not acknowledge its inherent contradiction, this compulsion to reimagine something that doesn’t just belong to me. And essential to respect the beauty in the sincerity of a moment, well-lived, in all of its kaleidoscopic dimensions.

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Micaela Brinsley is a Tokyo-born writer, editor, and independent researcher of art and performance. Recent work can be found in Tenement Press, Strings Magazine, Antiphony Journal, Horizon Magazine, and Asymptote. She writes ekphrastic essays about women artists of the surrealistic and abstract periods for A Women’s Thing and is the co-editor-in-chief of the arts and literary magazine, La Piccioletta Barca. She lives in Buenos Aires. Online she can be found on IG at @mic_brinsley or at her website micaelabrinsley.my.canva.site