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Charles Harrison. Painting the Difference: Sex and Spectator in Modern Art.

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Charles Harrison. Painting the Difference: Sex and Spectator in Modern Art. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005. 312 pp., 50 color ills. 130 b/w. $65, $45 paper

Charles Harrison's Painting the Difference is an account of the development of modern art in which sexual difference is assigned a pivotal role. It is also a theoretical study of the function of the picture plane--"that elusive construct," as Harrison calls it--reconceived as a site of self-critical exchange between spectator and content. Finally, the book is a record of Harrison's own critical engagement with paintings he identifies as "exceptional," his puzzlement and fascination best captured perhaps in the discussion in two central chapters of the Edgar Degas monotype Woman Reclining on a Couch. (1)

Harrison puts forth the thesis that how women look constitutes a "factor significantly driving change" in modern art (xi). This is scrupulously refined in the course of an extensive critical analysis carried out in characteristic, tightly argued style. Inverting common modernist assumptions, Harrison argues that the self-consciously factitious images of women produced predominantly in Paris from the early 1860s onward were not an incidental consequence of the technical modernization of painting, but rather that the question of how women glance out of the picture plane and how they are to be looked at motivated and drove these technical changes. Toward the end of an early chapter on Pierre-Auguste Renoir, a case study of two paintings that mark a departure from the norm, Les Parapluies (1883) and La Loge (1874), he writes: "I believe it was first and foremost in pictures of women that artists in the later nineteenth century generally learned and practiced techniques both for the representation of...

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