Consuming painting : food and the feminine in Impressionist Paris / Allison Deutsch.

"A reexamination of French Impressionism, focusing on the culinary metaphors that the most influential nineteenth-century critics used to express attraction or disgust toward artworks"-- Provided by publisher.

"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."--Publisher description.

University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State University Press, [2021]

xii, 200 pages : illustrations (some colour) ; 26 cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Metaphor and materiality in nineteenth-century art criticism -- The flesh of painting -- The confected canvas -- Impressionist market gardener.