Mary Cassatt

Baby's First Caress, Mary Cassatt (1891)

"The truth is that our value lies in feeling, in intuition, in our vision that is subtler than that of men and we can accomplish a great deal provided that affectation, pedantry, and sentimentalism do not come to spoil everything." - Berthe Morisot to Mary Cassatt

Over the last few years I have become immensely fond of books that focus on a single artist.  While there is something exhilarating in the grand sweep of an intellectual tradition, it has become a firm belief of mine that to truly understand any person of note you must have a chronology of their work, sampled across its various phases.  No great artist or thinker ever stands still, and neither an average nor their mature efforts alone will give a true accounting of their deepest nature.  And so it has become that I do not so much read novels as read authors, not so much view masterpiece paintings as masterful artists in their entirety.  I wish to benefit from their vision, not just admire its results.

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) has been on my radar since attending an exhibit on American artists in France a few years ago at the Denver Art Museum.  She immediately stood out for pictures like the one that head this post: images of mothers and children together, portrayed in ways that were often not flattering yet very moving:

Mother and Child (c1890)

What may not stand out immediately to many viewers, but which struck me strongly, is that the children look right for once.  It takes some context to appreciate this.  Take this Madonna by Raphael for instance:

Madonna del Granduca, Raphael (1507)

It's one of his well-known masterpieces but the baby... it's just not quite right.  The chubbiness is well-observed but the attitude is not.  The placement of the hand is too firm, and the face too full of awareness, for it to be quite right; there is, in essence, a lack of the spontaneity and thoughtlessness that comprises the nature of a young child.  It is still the psychology of an adult scaled down.  It could be argued that much of this is intentional given the subject matter, but you'll find no better treatment in all of Western art; babies and young children may be accurately rendered, but even if they look like an approximation they don't feel like one.  This is where Cassatt shone to me, and after having become quite inured to this state of things over the years, seeing an artist blow this all away made me realize what had been lacking.  When a book on Cassatt showed up at my local used book store it swiftly joined my collection, and having read it I am of the opinion that she is truly the greatest artist in history at her niche, but that she was held back by her intentions rather than aided by them.

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First to start with context: Cassatt was an expat on a mission.  She was born in the US but moved to France early in her adult life.  This was in part due to America being an artistic backwater and in part because France was (a little more) tolerant of women with ambitions.  This latter aspect was a defining mark of her personality: she was a feminist, and felt a proper indignation at the expectation that she do nothing more with her life than make the existence of a husband's more pleasant (Cassatt never married).  Above everything, then, she was driven to show that she could perform at the highest levels, as well as any man could, and by extension to prove her and all women's worthiness to engage in art.  Take this mid-career piece:

In the Loge (1879)

It rather strikes me as a projection of herself as she wishes to be viewed: a serious, intelligent woman who is a consumer of the arts.  She is the focus of the painting not because of her appearance but because of her engagements.  It is with no small amount of spite that Cassatt includes a man comically posed in the background, peering at her through his eyeglasses; a buffoon who in his gawking does not appreciate the gravitas of this woman.

...and yet, I find myself put off by the picture.  It is a bit too posed, and in her emphatic depiction Cassatt has made her figure too "hard"; rather than being led to the vision I crash into it and capsize.  It is a case where I feel a painting has strayed from expression to manifesto.  That is, Cassatt is not so much painting what she deeply feels and believes, which is the wellspring for all great art, but merely what she has consciously decided upon and is trying to prove to us.  It reminds me of a line in Thomas Merton's autobiography, that "...my attitude and my desire of argument [at the time]... implied a fundamental and utter lack of faith... and attachment to my own opinion."  Cassatt is being combative, putting up a fine front for her contemporaries but in doing so hinting at a need in her character.  She is not so certain as she would like to project.

Now, during her time in Europe Cassatt did not merely stay in France.  She first went to Spain and was influenced greatly by the works she saw there, absorbing and reproducing some of their color and realism.  Later she also visited Italy and was swayed by some of the late Renaissance masters with their line and form.  But it is with the Impressionists that she is chiefly associated.  They were the avant garde in Paris at the time, the rule-breakers, the disruptors, the ones talking about freedom from the oppression of imitation and tradition.  It is obvious to see why she would be attracted to them.  As such, she also picked up their techniques and produced a few nice paintings in that style:

Poppies in a Field (1875)

I find this painting quite pleasant, more so in my book than this digital reproduction.  Cassatt has chosen one of the standard set pieces of the Impressionists, a flower field, that allows her to show off the style's strengths of bright light and flecks of color.  And yet, what is most delightful about the image is not the poppies but the child.  Rendered with remarkable simplicity, Cassatt has yet conveyed that simple squat of interest.  They've seen something on the ground and want to have a look at it, or are maybe just gathering some grass together for a bouquet.  It is rather the inverse of the usual Impressionist purpose: the flowers and their color are not the emphasis, but merely an encircling structure that directs our attention to the painting's true focus.  

Which, on the topic of Impressionism and style, we must now come to Degas.  Of all the unlikely pairings, Cassatt was attracted to Degas and was his protege until he died.  It is a bizarre match that I can somewhat understand yet still find completely baffling.  Degas was the most intellectual of the Impressionists and constructed his canvases with a Classical finality that many of the movement were actively working to shake off.  This seems to have appealed to Cassatt.  Yet I can tell you that if he was not downright misogynistic, his attitude toward women was not positive or even quite normal:

The Rehearsal on Stage, Degas (1874)

When I look at a Degas painting like the one above I can see how he has posed the figures, how he has used the female form as a wonderful tool to model the poses and their structure.  Yet they look ghoulish to me, without an inner light of life; the glow that a man would normally get from observing women dancing gracefully is lacking.  As he is famous for saying, his primary interest in painting was "rendering movement and painting pretty clothes"; the females themselves seem to offer not the slightest interest to his senses.  Or take one of his nudes:

The Tub, Degas (1886)

"Women can never forgive me. They hate me, they can feel that I 'm disarming them. I show them without their coquetry, in the states of animals cleaning themselves..."

The image and the statement concur: whatever his reasons for primarily painting the opposite sex it is not due to an overflow of positive sentiment.  Yet for some reason, this is the man that Cassatt's opinions were enthralled to.  And I do mean enthralled.  Take this story relayed by a mutual friend:

The story is that one day, in front of Degas, Miss Cassatt in assessing a well known painter of their acquaintance dared to say: "He lacks style."  At which Degas began to laugh, shrugging his shoulders as if to say: These meddling women who set themselves up as judges!  What do they know about style?

This made Miss Cassatt angry.  She went out and engaged a model who was extremely ugly, a servant-type of the most vulgar kind.  She had her pose in a robe next to her dressing-table, with her left hand at the nape of her neck holding her meagre tresses while she combed them with her right, in the manner of a woman preparing for bed.  The model is seen almost entirely in profile.  Her mouth hangs open.  Her expression is weary and stupid.

When Degas saw the painting, he wrote to Miss Cassatt: What drawing! What style!

And here it is:

Girl Arranging Her Hair (1886)

Once again, Cassatt needs to argue something, and the result is not conviction but petulance.  His comments enraged her and so she needed to show him that she did have a sense of style, doing so in Degas' own language by producing a Classical pose that would not look out of place on a Venus or undine.  But then Cassatt must also go further: and look how this motif can be done without the normal attractions of a female as well!  She can not just produce a stylish image but do so with an ugly girl, and so emancipate the judgement from any consideration other than that of picture making.  The author of my book tried valiantly to put this in the light of enlightened righteousness, but seeing these and other episodes crop up repeatedly rather gave the impression that Cassatt doth protest too much.  She can paint, there is no doubt about that, but she is still not painting from her core here.  Her uncertainty continues to try to prove itself.

Now, my intent with this is not to skewer Cassatt's character but to make sense of her artistic oddities.  While I mentioned above that she fell in with the Impressionists the truth is that she went through quite a few styles, before and after, such that to the end of her career she pursued new techniques to master.  Impressionism for her was a phase, a toolkit, but not a reason.  If I might make another demonstration of this, let us take one of my favorite paintings of Cassatt's:

Lydia at the Loom (c1881)

Here she has made ample use of the sketchiness which Impressionism was known for yet all it truly does is serve to focus our attention on the head.  Lydia was Cassatt's sister and she loved her dearly; when Lydia passed away (she had always been sickly), all painting ceased for at least a year.  So here is Lydia, just Lydia, observed with a sister's love, the person and the expression captured in painted memory.  The rest is window dressing, and concentrating too long on the lines of the loom or the lower parts of the dress detract from the impact rather than heighten it (though it should be noted that the loom does marvelously help structure the image, bracketing the area with the head and then sloping on the side with the shoulder).  Like with Poppies in a Field above, even if the style came from the Impressionists the motive for painting does not.  Cassatt was only with them because they were young rebels challenging the status quo, like she thought of herself, and she used their techniques to fit in with her social group and, as always, to show off that she could.  But she never did deeply adopt the reason for their art, and when it comes to Lydia's face, the part Cassatt cares about most, it is formed with a precision that is at odds with the rest of the image.

This, then, I feel, is the great weakness of much of Cassatt's art: her technique, her message, and her essence are not in alignment.  She was fundamentally divided within herself, and her motive for doing much of what she did appears to have been no more than a need to prove that she could.  It is as I once said of the anime series Hyouka:

What I was watching, despite the pretense otherwise, was not a story about talent and the growth pains of adolescence but KyoAni's [the animation studio] demonstration of its own prowess.  In other words, Hyouka isn't burning with a desire to say anything in particular, but it is passionate about saying it well.

When Cassatt was trying to show off, which she did an inordinate amount of the time, it was something of a waste.  Such an impulse can provide motivation, but I do not believe that it alone can bring forth great art, and with Cassatt always looking over her shoulder she was bound to produce many works of self-conscious mediocrity.  Yet even from the beginning when she let herself free to speak on that which she felt most tenderly, she excelled:

Reading La Figaro (1878)
(I had to take the picture from my book; the online versions are atrocious)

Here is Cassatt's mother reading the newspaper.  I feel like I am looking at my own mother; if not in exact appearance, yet nonetheless observed with a love for the wrinkles, the slight jowls, and the way the neck meets the chin in an older woman.  She's no longer beautiful in a traditional sense, but that is utterly swept aside in the face of what she means [1].  Or even take a more standard beauty:

Young Woman Sewing in the Garden (c1881)

It is of their maid, and what a lovely piece it is.  It immediately strikes one as being "right".  Our attention goes to the face, where it should be, and the structure underscores this with the colored triangle of the body clearly leading to it with the background forming a frame.  The lightness of the strokes in the folliage match the beautiful flow of her dress.  Everything is aligned and the painting is in harmony.  Even if it is helped along by the attractiveness of the girl, its appeal exists separate of this, and thereby embodies a far more mature statement than Girl Arranging Her Hair ever can.  This only happens when Cassatt forgets what she's trying to say and just speaks instead.  Which, if my examples have not made obvious, I believe is when she is portraying women in traditional, domestic scenes.

This seems to me to be the reason for the lack of alignment in so much of Cassatt's art.  Her ideal was to forge an image of women that was outside of the home, yet the gift she was given was an exquisite sensitivity to the traits of her own sex which have made them the cradle of society.  Indeed, one of the greatest insights I have gained from Cassatt is from how she conveys these other women.  In the history of art one predominantly finds women in two forms: the beauty and the hag.  But these are of course all painted by men, for men, and in the male mind "hot or not" is an innate distinction.  Cassatt's women are rendered with feeling, unlike Degas', but this feeling is not dependent upon their attractiveness:

The Dress Fitting (c1891)

Here the main woman is not a beauty, but she's not ugly either.  She just has human features, one of the many variations that one will find out there amongst the populace, with no impulse to massage them to an ideal (it is also in a consciously Japanese style, yet another thing Cassatt dabbled in, imitated effectively, but I don't believe ever got the essence of).  You can scroll back through all these images and see just how sincerely Cassatt has observed other women as people.  Which is why when she finally brought the women and children together late in her career she was able to draw on her full powers, but not before she overcame a few hurdles.

As Morisot warned her in the quote I used at the top, the danger of gentle, feminine feeling is sentimentality.  If Cassatt's women are tempered by a lack of male-like attraction, her womanly feeling toward children was at perilous risk of ruining the subject.  Take this work for instance:

At the Beach (1884)

It's the sort of painting that you'd put on a postcard for your grandma.  Cassatt has the pudgy little arms and face down, but there's nothing else to do but d'awww at the image (also again notice the shift between the loose background, which is merely an afterthought, and the more clearly-delineated subjects that Cassatt truly cares about).  Or this one, which is even more saccharine:

The Sisters (1885)

We've strayed into sticky-honey-sweet territory now, the girls staring up with a simultaneous impulse to convey cuteness, vulnerability, and affection.  It's everything you'd want out of little girls and when concentrated this way it just becomes gaggy.  Alone, children in Cassatt's hands are just too much of a trap.  But somewhere along the way she had the idea, probably against all of her conscious inclinations, to portray these children with their mothers, the ultimate expression of the female domestic role, and unfortunately for her ideology the result is extraordinarily meaningful:

Young Mother Sewing (1890)

Here is a woman observed as a person, just as she is, engaged in one of the many tasks which make up her life, and the child is no longer emotional flypaper.  Their relationship is immediately clear without pandering, and all the skills of composition and style that Cassatt had mastered serve a purpose [2].  Or, to link the header image again:

Baby's First Caress (1891)

Here is simply a mother with her child.  She is not particularly pretty and he is not particularly adorable.  The child does not gently caress the face but positively squishes his mother's lips and chin in his fumbling grasp.  But she doesn't mind, and even smiles a little bit, kissing that hand back because it is just so precious to her.  Nothing is mocked up and that is why it is perfect.  

This, to my mind, is something new in Western visual art: average motherhood as meaningful but not heroic.  There had been thousands of Madonna-and-Childs before Cassatt, of course, but these were necessarily so elevated as to be ideal.  Without a belief in the Great Christian Drama to support them, few of these paintings are humanly moving.  Which also resulted in a kind of tacit depreciation, for without the great drama motherhood fell far below the level of heroic meaning.  It was just something women did, for which we were fond of our mothers for, but which we were also to grow out of [3].  

"It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in a language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs." - Far from the Madding Crowd

Ironically, the quote above was written by Thomas Hardy (a man), but I can't help but think it was expressed to him by a female acquaintance.  Underlying the male ideal of a meaningful life is a sense of what constitutes heroism.  Like with The Old Man and the Sea, at some point one must pit one's will against a formidable, perhaps impossible, goal, even to the point of sacrificing one's life, in an attempt to overcome that opposition and in turn surpass one's own limitations [4].  That is how a great life has been defined, and that is what motherhood has none of.  Struggle of course.  Effort of course.  Sacrifice to the highest degree.  But nothing of the combative, oppositional element that would give it the quality of traditional heroism.

There has of late been an attempt to address this by lionizing motherhood, calling it heroic, but I believe that this is a good intention misapplied.  It is still essentially playing by one sex's rules.  It is for this same reason that I dislike Wonder Woman: you don't truly demonstrate the value of the feminine by showing she can be just like the boys and beat up bad guys too.  That's hammering her into a particular mold, and in doing so admitting that you are still only thinking in those terms (give or take that outfit...).  

But whatever Cassatt's images of mothers and children are, they are not elevated and they are not heroic, and this is precisely what gives them their immense value.  She has captured the essence of the dynamic, its strength and its meaningfulness, without resorting to an outside standard.  Even above her remarkable portraits of other women, I believe this is what she will be remembered for.

Ultimately, I'm not sure Cassatt ever recognized the value of her achievement.  She kept on experimenting with new techniques until she eventually went blind from cataracts.  Perhaps she was never aware that she'd found her taproot, or perhaps she just kept searching because it was habit by then.  Perhaps she never did reconcile the image of herself that she projected with the reality:

The first is a self portrait (1878) and the second a portrait done of her by Degas (c1880-1884).   A calm, fashionable artist versus a nervous, slightly pinched, and extremely self-conscious woman.  She wanted the former, but was the latter (I find this portrait by Degas to be magnificent).  But this is once again said without criticism.  She set out to prove herself in the traditional way, and in the process did so in a manner that was new to Western art, even if she never did approve of it herself.  And for that I'm grateful for her and what she has added to our collective consciousness. 

The Conversation (1896)

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[1] But per her habits, Cassatt has also had to insert a mirror into her Reading Le Figaro.  Its presence is necessary for pictorial construction, but the choice of a reflective surface is a common contrivance that appears in several of her paintings as she shows off her ability to render different perspectives.  Yet, frankly, I didn't even notice it was a mirror the first few times; its nature is just that unimportant.  I love this painting, but I love it in spite of some of the things Cassatt put into it.

[2] The Young Mother Sewing serves as a great contrast to the Figaro in the footnote above.  Here the space behind the mother is a set of windows, but rather than try to show off how well she can render the perspective Cassatt has utilized them to clearly outline the mother's upper body (which as with the maid in the garden is supported by the blue triangle of her dress in a Classically stable composition).  The focus is in the right place, and if the visual reality suffers for it the painting gains.

[3] Writing this line I'm reminded of how Robert Louis Stevenson's books, which are really meditations on being male in various forms, inevitably involve the separation of the boy from his mother.  He needs to get out beyond her protection to engage with the world, endanger himself, but ultimately become a proper man.  

[4] Perhaps the best demonstration of the difference in perspective on this subject comes from a GoodReads review of The Old Man and the Sea:

Oh, my good lord in heaven. Cut your line, land your boat and go to McDonald's! Just as in the case of The Great Gatsby, I understand the book. Yes, I know it changed the way American writers write. I also understand that it celebrates the ridiculous American idea that you're only a REAL man if you've done something entirely purposeless, but really dangerous, in pursuit of making yourself look like the bull with the biggest sexual equipment. Get over it, already! Go home and clean out the refrigerator, or wash the curtains, or vacuum under the furniture. Pick your kids up from school or take your daughter bra shopping. THAT would impress me. Being too dumb to cut your fishing line? Not the mate I would pick...

The only bright spot about the book is if you think of it on a metaphorical level: there is a point at which ALL of us must grit our teeth and hold on in the face of despair. That is the definition of life. However, if that's the point, then the plot situation needs to be one of necessity (like the shipwreck in Life of Pi), instead of stubbornness. 

It is such an accidentally enlightening piece.  The author clearly doesn't get it, doesn't feel in the slightest the draw of the heroic impulse.  What's meaningful to her is something reliable, family-oriented, and quotidian.  Incidentally, I find both Old Man and the Sea and RLS's works to be interesting expressions of heroism dying in the modern world, the last gasps of what it means to be "a man" as the life of industrial suburbia crushes it beneath its workaday wheels.