A arte de Mary Cassatt e Camille Claudel: relações de gênero como construção histórica na França no final do século XIX.

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the relations of gender, history and society, from the trajectory of two women artists actively inserted in the field of Art in France in the late nineteenth century: Mary Cassatt and Camille Claudel. Mary Cassatt (1844-1920), an American artist, spends her adult life in Paris and establishes connections with the impressionists and critics of art, leveraging her production beyond the borders between the two countries. Camille Claudel (1864-1943), French artist, has an intense production in the area of sculpture in the late nineteenth century, alternating symbolist and authorial references, amidst a troubled context next to the artist Auguste Rodin, with whom he produces much of his life. This work aims to question their trajectories, obscured in the middle of a traditional and largely male historiography. Letters and biographies, as well as the works produced by them in the period in question, are used as documentary sources. The methodology used in the research is the comparative analysis of images and texts as narratives, focusing on the discussion about the categories of the public x private, proposed by Griselda Pollock (1988), regarding the different ways men and women move in France at the end of the nineteenth century, and the relationship between sexuality, modernity and modernism. It is also a reference of the Marcel Detienne (2004) research for the possibility of comparing distant objects, such as the trajectory of two artists who lived in different temporalities despite the same spatiality, in order to understand how the artistic protagonism occurred in the trajectory of the artists, in the midst of its social role and production context. In this sense, it was understood that both were inserted in the system of Arts through their personal relations. Although different, their social positions influenced to obtain space in a field dominated by masculinity. Mary Cassatt knew the success and enjoyed the same did not happen with Camille Claudel who had to deal with a society with rigid standards regarding the behavior of a woman too independent for the time.