Eye to eye

The latest exhibitions opening at Compton Verney make an intriguing mix. Essentially they boil down to looking at women and looking at animals, but through the eyes of observers a century and a half apart, working in different media and with entirely different objectives.

The title of the first exhibition, Vive La Parisienne: Women through the eyes of the Impressionists, says it all. It takes a look at life in late 19th-century Paris and how women were portrayed by the predominantly male Impressionist artist. Twenty-five paintings, lithographs and dry-point etchings from artists including Manet, Degas, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Bonnard, Pisarro, and one of the few female artists working among them, Mary Cassatt, raise questions about the role of women, the woman artist, and the relationship between artist and sitter.

La Parisienne - the good-looking, fashionable, self-aware, metropolitan woman - a concept taken from paintings of that name by Manet, Renoir and Tissot, is the inspiration behind the exhibition. It personified the city and was a model on which the Impressionists could project their ideas of modernity, femininity and identity.

Paris was a rapidly modernising city when the Impressionists started working in the 1860s. Wide-open boulevards, parks and public spaces began to be part of the landscape. Wanting to capture a sense of this modern life, the Impressionists turned their focus on to the city itself, painting scenes from everyday with freshness and spontaneity, and included the idea of La Parisienne.

So we see the confident poses of society women such as Renoir's Misia Sert (1904), John Singer Sargent's stunningly beautiful Lady Helen Vincent (1901-10), and Helleu's Woman with a Black Hat draped languorously across a chaise longue with an air of insufferable, fashionable boredom.

We see women at work, home and leisure as well, pictures strong on narrative: women and children enjoying the new Avenue de Bois in Bonnard's colour lithograph of 1899; a well-dressed woman in Tissot's In Church leaving the confessional, her head tilted perhaps listening in on the next penitent, and in Degas' simple lithograph, a singer, ruffle-skirted, stands under a striped canopy at a caf concert singing her heart out to an unseen audience.

An etching of the artist Mary Cassatt in the Louvre, also by Degas, tells another story, that of a woman extending the freedoms of modern life as an active and independent observer of culture. Degas, admiring Cassatt's work, had invited her to join the Impressionists, making her the first woman to do so. The loose brushstrokes in Cassatt's Portrait of a Woman (1881-3) convey a sense of this freedom.

A wonderfully luminous ceramic plaque of La Parisienne (1887), from the workshop of ceramicist Thodore Deck and painted by society portraitist Paul-Csar Helleu, known for his dry-point studies and portraits of fashionable women, suggests other kinds of freedom. For one, the stylish young woman who looks straight out at us wears a blue hydrangea (the artist's or her choice?), a flower that having first appeared in Paris in the 1880s was adopted variously as a symbol of uniqueness, isolation and difference - or flirtation.

For another, she is not merely a visual focus for the observer. The exhibition notes suggest that La Parisienne, as a predominantly male concept, can be read as existing only to be looked at. This Parisienne, however, engages fully in the act of looking.

The second exhibition is also about looking and being looked at - boredom and confinement too - but the subjects this time are zoo animals. It is the UK premiere of Zoo, by Richard Billingham, who shot to fame in the hugely successful Sensation exhibition of young British artists at the Royal Academy in 1997, showing photographs of his family in the confines of their Midlands tower block home; he was also on the Turner Prize short-list for 2001.

Inspired by childhood visits to Dudley Zoo and by John Berger's 1980 critique of wildlife photography, Why we look at Animals, that argues the fundamental separation of animals and humans, Billingham took two years trawling zoos in Europe and South America to capture the effect of boredom and confined spaces on caged animals.

The resulting Zoo is a video and photograph installation that uses video loops compellingly to highlight the repetitive behaviour common in closely confined animals. The simple device of running sequences over and over again is disturbingly effective. It demands an emotional response.

One video shows a lion in a cage, lying down thoroughly bored. In another, a bear paces up and down. Then, a two-minute video of a tiger enduring torment from youngsters only inches away: an endlessly repeated ordeal. You get the idea.

Animals doing nothing much, nothing much for us to see either. "Is this it?" you catch yourself thinking. "Can I be bothered to watch . . . for two, four, 30 minutes?" You move on. Yet both thought and action betray the endless time endured by these animals.

Later, sitting in a darkened room with four animals projected on to the walls around me, each creature displaying signs of stress, I began to gain a sense of the psychological space of the zoo enclosure.

My eyes moved from the soporific, close-cropped image of a swaying elephant filling one wall, to a giraffe whose long blue tongue licked the bare concrete pavilion in lieu of leaves, and from rocking tapir to gloomy gorilla. There was no soundtrack, no commentary except what was inside my head.

You have to hand it to them. Compton Verney presents us two unlikely companions that make challenging viewing. Each exhibition in its own way, one more polemically, the other appealingly, makes us think about the relationship between viewer and viewed. But I wondered if the power of one diminished the other? I wondered, too, which way round to view them, the claustrophobic Zoo first or the lighter, Impressionistic La Parisienne.

Vive La Parisienne: Women through the eyes of the Impressionists and Zoo are at Compton Verney, Warwickshire, until December 10. The gallery is north-west of Banbury, six miles drive from the M40, Junction 12.