Mary Cassatt: feminine but no feminist
Mother and Child (The Goodnight Hug) (1880). by Mary Cassatt
A new exhibition of Mary Cassatt at the San Francisco Legion of Honor (October 5, 2024 to January 26, 2025) and its catalogue ( Mary Cassatt At Work , ed. Jennifer Thompson and Laurel Garber, Yale UP, 304pp, $55) shows the artist at ease with herself and her subjects. Cassatt usually painted domestic interiors with no clear sense of place; male characters were rare. She confined herself to the drawing room and nursery, the garden and river, and ignored the urban landscape. Her two great themes were the rituals of the rich, dressed in large hats and elaborate gowns, taking tea, attending the opera and riding in a carriage, as well as mothers and children, physically close and psychologically absorbed in each other.
Little Girl in a Blue Armchair (1878) captures the bare-armed, bare-legged child, girdled by a tartan shawl that’s echoed in her red-striped socks and the ribbon in her hair. Sunk in the wide soft chair with floral decorations, enclosed and protected by two more padded armchairs behind her, she rests one hand behind her head and gazes downward. She has bangs on her pale forehead, widely spaced eyes, and the same self-satisfied expression as the somnolent brown-and-black Belgian Griffon, contentedly resting on the nearby soft chair. Left all alone with only the dog for company, the languid little girl seems completely absorbed in her dreams and thoughts. There’s a psychological tension between the girl’s childish pose and her air of adult solitude.
Little Girl in a Blue Armchair (1878) By Mary Cassatt – National Gallery of Art, Washington, D
In Woman with a Pearl Necklace in a Loge (1879), Cassatt’s older sister Lydia looks at the spectator, leans on her right arm and peers to the left. A large mirror behind her vaguely reflects fourteen people in two curved tiers of gilded private boxes. With a bold décolletage, she wears flowers in her hair and on her white-trimmed pink gown, pearls around her neck, and holds a fan in her white-gloved hand. The heavy chandelier casts a glinting light on her feathery reddish blond hair—heightened by her soft red velvet chair, smiling lips, white teeth and rosy-cheeked childlike face. Representing the height of the beau monde, she’s attentive yet self-absorbed, and enhances the spectacle of the opera she’s about to watch.
Woman with a Pearl Necklace in a Loge (1879) By Mary Cassatt
Driving (1881) portrays the subjects close up in an open two-seat carriage with whip, lamp and high wheels. But it fails to suggest any human interaction or dynamic progress. The three wooden figures on the right—woman driver, little pink-cheeked girl and top-hatted coachman facing backward—form a strangely rigid pyramid. Separated from the horse on the left by the carriage lamp, balanced by the hindquarters and docked tail of the cut-off animal and connected to it by the taut rein, they seem to be in a photographer’s studio, posing against a backdrop of woods. The woman’s conflicting roles as fashionable lady and expert driver seem to have turned her into stone. The model is not “managing the reins of a carriage,” but clutching them and going nowhere. Removed from the domestic setting, Cassatt seems quite lost. This picture looks feeble when compared to Degas’ lively A Carriage at the Races (1870).
Driving (1881) By Mary Stevenson
Cassatt’s brother, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, was one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in America. In Alexander Cassatt and His Son (1885) the boy, dressed in a black suit, tie and boots, and stiff white Eton collar, perches on the arm of a soft yellow-and-red chair whose colors and pattern are echoed in the background drapes. One hand rests on his knee, the other is wrapped affectionately around his father’s shoulder. The father’s black jacket is offset by the white newspaper he’s holding with both hands and resting on his crossed legs. Though Aleck has a ruddy complexion and drooping brown mustache, father and son, whose cheeks and foreheads are touching as they gaze off to the right, look remarkably similar. The alignment of the eyes, two adjacent heads and two black torsos merging into one suggest their physical bond and psychological connection. (The son graduated from Harvard, inherited a fortune, and became another wealthy financier and industrialist.)
- Alexander Cassatt and His Son (1885) By Mary Cassatt
The following works (except for Woman Bathing ) are not in this exhibition but worth noting. The rower in Boating Party (1894), clad entirely in dark blue with a large beret and wide cummerbund, has his back to the viewer. The vigorous and athletic oarsman and the billowing white sail propel the boat. Rowing hard in the rough water, he bends his back and braces one foot against the thwart that cuts across the edge of the mother’s dress. Both the sailor and the mother—who’s seated upright, holding a reclining baby and facing him in the bow of the boat—are silhouetted against the brighter blue of the river, which touches the beach and houses on the distant shore. Concerned about the safety of her pink-dressed, stiff-legged baby at the center of the picture, whose face is half-shadowed by a hat, the mother looks anxiously at the sailor and seems eager to reach their destination.
Boating Party (1894) By Mary Cassatt
Next to a cup of tea on a bedside table, and framed by an emerald green headboard, a drowsy, dark-haired, soft-lipped mother lies under the covers, her head denting two white pillows in Breakfast in Bed (1897). Her arms enfold her curly-haired baby, nightshirt rucked up to her waist. She’s sitting, with her elbow resting on her mother’s arm, on top of the blanket that covers her mother’s body. The mother’s arms and baby’s legs are both crossed. There’s a fine contrast between the mother’s dreamy expression and relaxed arms, and the baby’s alert features and expressive gestures. In Cassatt’s art, mothers and children are intimately connected in a sensual way. Fathers play no part in the family and are always absent.
Breakfast in Bed (1897) By Mary Cassatt
Cassatt’s best works are the colours, drawings and designs influenced by Japanese prints. In The Letter a lady with graying hair and dark eyebrows sits at a brown escritoire, looking down at a sheet of writing paper on the blue-leather projecting desk. She has finished writing a letter and, slightly bending her head, seems to think of her correspondent as she licks the envelope before sealing it. The colours are sharply divided and her body is clearly outlined against the background. The leafy green-on-white design of the wallpaper animates the picture and seems to dance behind the similar beige-on-blue design of her dress. The whirling patterns provide a dynamic contrast to the woman’s contemplative self-absorption.
The Letter, by Mary Cassatt
In Woman Bathing (1891) a half-draped woman, standing on a carpet decorated with swirling leaves, bends before a mirror and performs her toilette. Her curved back is beautifully exposed and her hands, next to two bottles of perfume, are prayerfully dipped into a basin of blue water. Her green, pink and white dress contrasts with the patterns on the carpet and on the water jug; the blue water is subtly reprised in the wallpaper and background of the carpet. Though the woman’s face and breasts are hidden, we remain privileged witnesses to her private ablutions.
Woman Bathing (1890-1891) by Mary Cassatt
Degas’ etching Mary Cassatt at the Louvre: The Etruscan Gallery (1880) shows her tilted, propped up by an umbrella and gazing intently at the huge painted terra-cotta figures on a tomb from Cerveteri. The long-haired enigmatically smiling recumbent husband, dead but still lively, folds his arms protectively around his wife’s shoulders. They lie on top of a sarcophagus enclosed in a glass case and confront Cassatt. D. H. Lawrence, emphasising the joyous nature of Etruscan funerary sculpture, said the people possessed a delicacy and spontaneity, and saw death as a pleasant continuation of life. The Etruscan couple represent the sensual pleasure and marital bliss that Cassatt, gazing at them through protective glass, can observe but never experience.
Mary Cassatt at the Louvre (c. 1880) by
Edgar Degas
Envious and malicious, Cassatt was disdainful about her infinitely superior teacher and friend Degas, and called him “common”. Like Degas, she became blind at the end of her life. Cassatt was even snobbish about her contemporary upper-class American expatriates, who had superior intelligence and greater talent. Her biographer writes that she had “little regard for Henry James and loathed Edith Wharton, whom she thought no good as a writer and whose husband she regarded as a parvenu. She felt they were all catering too much to ‘Society.’ ”
She was horrified to belatedly discover that the English writer Vernon Lee, her sometime houseguest, was a lesbian. Fearing she’d be involved in a sexual scandal, Cassatt haughtily announced: “she once staid with me, she will never again.” Gertrude Stein, both lesbian and Jew, also provoked her hostility and anti-Semitic outrage, though both were born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania. Cassatt spread false rumors about Jewish morality and a famous scientist, and exclaimed: “Did you know that Columbia College has become a college for Jews, who have absolutely no sense of right and wrong. Now my dear, Madame Curie is a Polish Jewess! So I have been assured and it is only too evident that she also has no sense of right and wrong.”
With inherited wealth, many servants, a grand country house 45 miles northwest of Paris and no husband or children to worry about, Cassatt had great freedom to paint. Degas was her teacher; she had no pupils. The curators of this exhibition, struggling to apply a feminist twist to Cassatt’s work, absurdly claim that she ”was in fact [what fact?] a modernist pioneer . . . and created radical art under the cover of ‘feminine’ subject matter.” They state that “Cassatt’s work takes on new meaning when seen through the lens of labor,” and mention work and labor ten times in one paragraph. But repetition is propaganda, not argument. They also claim, “in her depictions of childcare, Cassatt shows the complex interiority of these sitters . . . to signal their thoughts and intellectual preoccupations.” But there is no complexity—the meaning is obvious—and the curator never defines the sitters’ thoughts.
Every painting in this exhibition reveals Cassatt’s limitations, undermines the far-fetched feminist thesis, and absolutely confirms her traditional reputation as a sentimental painter of mothers and children. Her women, mostly confined indoors, are nursing infants, bathing babies, taking tea, wearing canopied hats, displaying jewelry, flapping fans and adoring dogs. She was not a radical innovator, but a faithful colleague and imitator of Degas’ drivers and bathers, and of Renoir’s more animated and lifelike children. Her babies were the all-too-obvious artistic compensations of a loveless woman. “Cassatt at Work” might sprain her wrist pouring tea, but real work was portrayed in Edgar Degas’ The Laundress , Gustave Caillebotte’s The Floor Scrapers and Claude Monet’s The Coal Workers. It would be far better to recognize Cassatt’s real achievements than to inflate and distort them.
Her friend Berthe Morisot was a much better painter—and human being—than Cassatt. The letter she composed on her deathbed to console her daughter was one of the most poignant ever written: “My little Julie, I love you as I die; I shall still love you even when I am dead; I beg you not to cry, this parting was inevitable.” Morisot’s farewell has more feeling than the whole of Cassatt’s cold character and repressed life. All Cassatt’s ladies I would give away, for one great Degas or a nude Manet.
Jeffrey Meyers has published Impressionist Quartet: The Intimate Genius of Manet and Morisot, Degas and Cassatt (Harcourt, 2005), and biographies of Wyndham Lewis and Modigliani.
A Message from TheArticle
We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout these hard economic times. So please, make a donation.
