La Mise en Scène de la Mode. Giovanni Boldini et le Rôle Social du Vêtement Esthétique à Paris à la Fin du Siècle

Women are undoubtedly the most important part of his paintings: they are icons of fragile beauty and, at the same time, the image of a modern woman in search of affirmation and emancipation. These are not mere evocations of faces and bodies, but a deepening of the social significance that women, in their eccentric and original individuality, represented at the end of the nineteenth century. Whether they were the wives of prominent businessmen, successful actresses or studio models, it was not their physical beauty but their inscrutable particularity, highlighted by the pose, the clothes and the nervous and sometimes precisely descriptive line of the drawing, that made them icons of beauty in his paintings. This has undoubtedly been Boldini's skill from the outset, but especially since the 1980s, when he defined a typology of the full-length portrait that was entirely his own.