By now, the nineteenth-century American painter Mary Cassatt has become, like that other, earlier Mary, almost too well known as the pioneer in her field. First of all her sex, rock of the faith: Cassatt, the only woman image-maker between Betsy Ross and Grandma Moses whose name most museumgoers recognize, is the Madonna of American art—a painfully perfect woman, with the entire weight of women’s work in American art on her shoulders. A new retrospective of her work—it began at the Art Institute of Chicago, opened last month at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and will end up in June at the National Gallery in Washington—is even called, a little too typically, “Mary Cassatt: Modern Woman.” (The show has an excellent catalogue, edited by Judith A. Barter.) Although the title is fairly taken from a mural-painting project, it uncomfortably underlines her role as an icon. Cassatt is a Modern Woman, not an American Painter, and in an unbelieving age the first thing most of us feel when we see an icon is the desire to see it broken. (“But she’s such a boring painter,” an American woman painter wailed in private recently, boxed in by her reverence.)
Even Cassatt’s admirers, in the twenty or so years since her art was revived by the first wave of feminism, have discovered that she is a hard filly to run successfully in the saintly-victim stakes. She came from an arrogant old-money family—her favorite brother became the head of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and looked like a cartoon of capital in a union newspaper—and her life, though earnestly feminist, was also flecked with all the prejudices of her class. (Of Leo and Gertrude Stein’s habits as collectors she remarked that they were “not Jews for nothing.”) Even worse for our pieties, the most obvious sign of her commitment to women’s rights was her desire to make pictures of mothers with babies. “Tea, clothes, and nursery,” one modern (male) critic sniffed. “Nursery, clothes, and tea.”
And yet her art and her life, seen close up, are not only more moving than one might expect but far more courageous. Cassatt had modest talent, but she was infinitely brave. Of all the American artists in Europe in her time, she was the only one to leap right off the diving board into the frog pond, while everyone else was wading in the shallows. And, drawing on a variety of sources—Quattrocento painting, Degas’s example, her own maiden-aunt gift for empathy—she was the first to grasp the modern condition of mother and child. She discovered, or recorded, a new emotion in the world, the nearly adulterous, exhausting love with which middle-class women have come to address their babies. She is hardly the Madonna of modern painting; she is something better—a more contrary Mary, a spirited Auntie Mame (her family actually called her that), the Katharine Hepburn of American art.
How restless even wealthy nineteenth-century American families were. The Cassatts scooted right around Pennsylvania throughout her girlhood: she was born in Pittsburgh in 1844, but the family soon stepped across the river to Allegheny City, where old man Cassatt, a businessman, got elected mayor; they went back to Pittsburgh, moved across the state to the big city of Philadelphia, sojourned in Paris, came back to the small town of West Chester, near Philadelphia, and then settled in the swank Southward district in Philly, so that Mary could go to art school.
In 1860, Mary enrolled, with very little fanfare, in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts’ “Antique Class.” The academy subsequently earned a reputation as a philistine bear pit for artists; Eakins, teaching there a generation later, suffered for insisting on showing male anatomies to female students. But the position of a young woman at the academy who was in love with art seems to have been interestingly ambiguous. The girls were excluded from life-drawing classes, but their presence as aspiring artists was taken for granted. Mary seems to have always wanted to be a painter, and what is striking in her life is not that this ambition left her isolated—throughout her apprenticeship, she was surrounded by other, equally gifted young women artists, among them her friends Eliza Haldeman and Emily Sartain—but that she didn’t get sidetracked. Readers of “Little Women,” the best record of young womanhood in the eighteen-sixties, will recall that a career in art is all Amy March wants. Amy visits Europe, sees Raphael, and decides that “talent isn’t genius, and no amount of energy can make it so”—true enough, though it hardly discouraged any of the men—and then she gets married. (In a startling spiritual coincidence, May Alcott, the original of the art-loving Amy March, eventually became one of Cassatt’s closest friends.) What made Cassatt unique was her high discouragement threshold—Amy March in armor.
The path from Philadelphia to Paris was a well-travelled one at the time, and Cassatt arrived back in Paris (she had learned French during her family’s earlier stay) in 1865, the year before Eakins. Once she was there, she did what artists were expected to do, which was mostly to copy paintings at the Louvre. She stayed in France for three and a half years. Her passport description—in the pre-photograph days, you had to endure a concise, even rude summary—said that she was five feet six, and had gray eyes, a big mouth and chin, a ruddy complexion, and a snub nose. Her barbed intelligence and a capacity for admiring got her into circles that were notoriously hard to crack. Mallarmé liked and respected her, and there were not many Rittenhouse Square girls who could say that. She seems to have been asexual—or, if that is a human impossibility, then to have made a decision to enter the cloister of art. Her excellent biographer, Nancy Mowll Mathews, finds a hint of a single, joking “engagement” to an old friend in the first years in Paris, and then nothing, male or female. Cassatt seems to have understood that marriage would mean the end of her career as an artist, as it sooner or later did for all the young women artists around her. (Perhaps it was her asexuality that Degas, neuter himself, was later drawn to.)
Few art students who have been to Paris can have had a flatter homecoming. The Cassatts, continuing their Pennsylvania wanderings, had moved to Altoona, following their railroad-executive son, Alexander, and not long afterward to Hollidaysburg, a small suburb of Altoona, ninety miles east of Pittsburgh. Mary had to use a maid as a model. “I should jump at anything in preference to America,” she moaned. Her two best Paris pictures, which she had sent to a Chicago dealer, burned up in the Great Chicago Fire: even Mrs. O’Leary’s cow was against her.
She got one lucky break. In 1871, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Pittsburgh decided that his new cathedral, a huge pseudo-Chartres, needed copies of two Correggios in Parma. The job bought her a ticket out; she was the one person with a brush in the neighborhood who knew what to do with it, and she had been to Europe. That December, she left for Parma with her friend Emily Sartain: she did a good job, got the picture painted. She then painted in Spain—her serious painting at the time was mostly mediocre, touristy bits of Mediterranean exotica—and went back to Paris, this time, it seems, determined never again to get pulled to Altoona.
Then, around 1875, she saw some pastels by Edgar Degas in a store window on the Boulevard Haussmann. They changed her life. The Impressionists were already well entrenched, as a scandale, and it was considered sensible and even stylish for middle-of-the-road expatriate artists to add a little brightly colored frosting to their pictures. But that wasn’t what she wanted. She wanted in, and was let in. She made friends with Pissarro, and then became a disciple of Degas—shrewdly embracing both the left- and the right-wing pillars of the new group. She took up pastels, as Degas had done, and her oils made a terrific leap forward: “Portrait of a Lady” (her mother, actually), painted very soon after her first exposure to Degas, replaces the forced, junior-year-abroad excitement of the “Spanish” pictures with a moody and impassively unsparing modern emotional flatness. She was invited to join the avant-garde group, and she had twelve works in the fourth Impressionist exhibition, in 1879.
Advanced Parisian art circles in the nineteenth century remained closed to outsiders, and particularly to Americans. Cassatt is almost our only native artist of any talent who was allowed to enter. This was owing partly to her talent, partly to her persistence, and partly, it must be said, to the fact that the exception to the general rule of the Parisian closed circle is offered to women, and particularly to American women, who choose to marry in. Cassatt married, but she didn’t marry a man. She married an Idea.
This meant giving up her American identity—the much more comfortable and familiar world of the expatriate painter. It was an emigration, not an evolution, and she did it without regret or remorse. It was a lot to give up. The life of American copyists in the Louvre—the sane, reasonable moderates—was beautifully easy. Paris in the eighteen-seventies was so interesting and so cheap that Cassatt’s aging parents would soon leave their latest Pennsylvania home, on Philadelphia’s Delancey Place, to move to Paris, just for the pleasure of it. But there was nothing easy about the Impressionist circle. They lived and worked and drank in the area around the Place de l’Europe and the Rue de Rome, up above the Gare Saint-Lazare—one of the few neighborhoods in Paris that had been unattractive before, were unattractive then, and remain unattractive to this day. The Impressionists were a contentious, beleaguered, censorious, grim little band. An aura of bonheur de vivre has clung to them, because they gave to the new facts of bourgeois pleasure the form of a permanent modern myth. But they were as crazed in their devotion to realizing their vision as monks on pillars, and, like the monks, knew no way down. What Cassatt got from them in return was seriousness, and the overwhelmingly clean feeling that comes to those who are doing good work that the world can’t see, who are the secret lovers of their time.
The Irish writer George Moore, not a stupid man, once announced that Cassatt’s “art was derived from Degas as Madame Morisot’s art was derived from Manet.” Although this “condescending cliché,” as another writer calls it, has understandably made a lot of feminists mad, it is essentially true: Cassatt’s style does derive from Degas’s, from the striated pastels to the more basic marriage of figuration and high color. The trouble with Moore’s remark, and with the tradition that deprecates Cassatt as a mere imitator, is its implied insistence that stylistic originality is the only marker of accomplishment in painting. Though Cassatt’s style derived from Degas’s, she did something profoundly different: turned his essentially cold, analytic, beautifully classical gaze into something engaged. She turned a dry, cold style into a dry, warm style.
It took her a while. Degas sent her out with a notebook to draw in the parks and the streets, and she seems to have done this dutifully. Then she turned the drawings into apprentice-work pictures of ladies drinking tea or gazing down from theatre loges. But the purpose of Degas’s teaching was to free her eye and her hand, to shake her out of her dogmatic slumbers, and it did. In 1881, when she showed eleven pictures in the sixth Impressionist exhibition, her father wrote to her brother Alexander, “Mame’s success is certainly more marked this year than at any time.” But it was a success of a new, “in” group kind, he went on, saying, “Artists of talent and reputation and other persons prominent in art matters ask to be introduced to her.”
Big movements and seismic changes in art are often better in their breaking apart than in their coming together. The rock critic Giles Smith once pointed out that punk rock lasted barely long enough to vomit on its own shoes but that post-punk, which came right afterward and depended on it—Elvis Costello, Joe Jackson—changed everything, and made music. It was only with the breakup, in 1886, of the Impressionists that Cassatt found her subject and her manner. Around 1889, she began doing a lot of pictures of mothers with their children, out of excitement, it seems, in her new role as the aunt of her younger brother’s children, and this became her obsessive subject for the next twenty-five years. The subject was almost too easy, and, as students of her work have pointed out, there was a general craze for pictures of mothers and children around that time. But Cassatt’s images don’t belong to the standard domestic, Kinder und Kirche family-enhancing line. Her mothers and children look like Audubon’s birds and beasts—they are isolated twosomes, placed outside the usual domestic setting. They’re alone. Even in the relatively early “Young Mother,” of 1888, the kiss the mother plants on the forehead of the distracted child is tense, wound up, almost needy. It is the isolation of the mother and child that marks Cassatt’s new images, and the bond that brings together mother and child seems less one of instinct than one of shared embarkation on a project: they clutch and cling and support each other like a pair of veteran apache dancers, or a knife-throwing team.
Although the long Christian tradition of Madonna-and-Child pictures might seem to offer a solid precedent for what Cassatt was trying to do, its idealizing tendency meant that making the mother and her child actually look like a mother and child was for the most part taboo—the number of convincing-looking mothers and babies in Christian painting is as small as the number of convincing-looking Crucifixions. Cassatt had the brains and the taste to see that the brief exception to this rule lay in the work of the Florentine painters of the Quattrocento. Botticelli was the holy name of the late nineteenth century, but where most of the painters of the time got the full Burne-Jones from him—the tripping, Madonna-faced maidens on point—Cassatt got the Tuscan realism that underlay it. Degas had told her to look at the hands of the Botticelli Madonnas, and not just the hands but the nails, to see how rough and peasantlike they were. From Botticelli she learned that truth was not incompatible with grace.
Not mother love but baby love became her subject. Her grasp of baby anatomy became perfect, and startling, even a little ugly, in its truth. In the pastel “Mathilde Holding a Baby Who Reaches Out to the Right,” of 1889, she caught the touching discrepancy between a baby’s soft, limp lower body and its hard, horizontal arms—the soft massive release downward, the nervous, angular, unarticulated stiff movement outward and upward. Cassatt saw at once the happiness of the perfect absorption of mother and child in each other, and the way that that happiness is shadowed by the facts of exhaustion and impermanence. The eyes of mother and child often don’t quite meet; the mother looks down, the baby looks out. (A child held tight by its mother will almost always look away, toward the horizon: a boat in port looking for the ocean.)
An early pastel, “Mother and Child,” is one of the few works of nineteenth-century art that can accurately be called radical, in the sense that there is nothing like it anywhere in earlier art. This little boy doesn’t just embrace his mother. He consumes her, with a passionate hug that erases their features and turns them into a single, heart-shaped form. For the first time, baby love is declared, unsentimentally, on the basis of truthful observation, as the equal in intensity and charge of any other kind of feeling. In an unpretentious way, Cassatt’s “Mother and Child” is as revolutionary an image, and violates as many taboos, as any Courbet: baby love is proclaimed as an emotion that stands on its own, outside religion or family relations, as a form of romantic love.
In 1890, Cassatt saw a show of Japanese prints at the École des Beaux Arts, and she began to make one-of-a-kind drypoint etchings. But if they are too close to pastiche to be completely satisfying as art, they are a nearly complete catalogue of mothering. She got the struggle of it, the way the child (see “The Child’s Bath”) is always going the other way—the muscular tension and exhaustion of wrestling with someone who has another intention.
From Cassatt’s time to ours, the question remains: Does true feminism lie in the rejection of traditional women’s work or in the exaltation and defense of the scorned “women’s subjects”? Is the assertion of nurture, of mothering, of the “domestic” sphere implicitly more radical than entering men’s worlds on men’s terms? Like Jane Austen, Mame Cassatt—this stubborn, tetchy spinster—chose the woman’s subject. She saw that for her friends and her sisters-in-law mothering was the most meaningful activity of their lives, though it wasn’t particularly “natural,” in the sense of producing poses of harmony and ease and grace. (In Cassatt’s world, naturalness belongs to the other world—of entertainments, shopping, and trying on.) Cassatt’s mothers, like Degas’s dancers, are being asked to produce poses, in the advancement of grace, that involve a lot of dull repetition. Her children are as taking and as indifferent to their mothers as gods are to nymphs, or men to opera girls. Cassatt is, on a smaller scale of achievement, to mothering what Jane Austen is to courtship: the outside viewer who grasps clearly, as the women involved grasp only vaguely, the essential disequilibrium of the activity, the fact that the woman always gives more love than she can hope to take. You can practically hear the familiar maternal monologue running through the head of the beautiful mother—half Botticelli Madonna, half young Virginia Woolf—in what may be Cassatt’s masterpiece, “Breakfast in Bed,” of 1897. Her face is watchful and evaluating, her eyes hooded, running off to one side, dead even to the comforting cup of morning coffee, and the weariness is played off against the almost Michelangelesque sureness of her relaxed, confident embrace of her baby.
On the strength of a growing reputation, Cassatt was approached in 1892 by the organizers of the great Columbian Exposition in Chicago, planned for the next year, to do a large-scale mural for what was to be a “Woman’s Building” there. This pavilion seems to have been a genuinely courageous project—an exhibition, undertaken entirely by women and sponsored by them, of the Newly Emancipated American Woman. Two murals were planned: one, to be undertaken by a talented, though now forgotten, American painter also resident in Paris, Mary MacMonnies, was to show oppressed “Primitive Woman”; Cassatt’s mural, in an identical lunette across the great hall of the building, was to show free “Modern Woman.”
Cassatt decided to take for her central subject of Modern Woman a scene of “Young Women Plucking the Fruit of Knowledge”—an allegorical number, with Gibson girls on ladders picking apples. The mural, sadly, survives only in a few color reproductions, but it does seem to have been slightly comic, looking more like the spring outing at Bryn Mawr than was Cassatt’s intention. (The murals seem to have been around as late as 1911, and then were destroyed.) Neither of the murals was much good as design. Cassatt made the mistake of trying to work in depth on a large surface, with a deep-space landscape behind the fruit-picking girl-scholars, and this gave the picture what was apparently a very uneasy and amateurish “float” on the wall. MacMonnies’ infinitely more conventional and decorative pseudo-Piero mural seems to have worked better. But the few good color reproductions that survive of Cassatt’s mural show that at least one of the figures in her central group—a strong-jawed, forthright-eyed young woman with a basket of cherries, looking off into the distance—was a perfect image of the emancipated American woman as she still sees herself, with all Hepburn’s or Amelia Earhart’s poise and eagerness.
The mural project helped confirm Cassatt’s reputation, which persists to this day, as top woman artist, and she made a triumphant return to America in 1898. Unfortunately, like so many artists, she hit pay dirt and quicksand at the same time: the market for her mother-and-child pictures was so large and her own nature was beginning to become so ornery that the original intensity began to bleed from them. After her American trip, the mothers and children became idly decorous—and even, in a new, stately regard for each other, sentimental. She became a mother-love factory, and her hand, never terribly skilled, began to coarsen, so that some of her last decade’s pictures are—hard to believe for Degas’s major acolyte—really vulgar. She had bought a handsome house fifty miles from Paris, and she lived there with a nurse companion and got crusty and colorful. Crusty people tend to be fun to read about and pretty awful to be around. People made pilgrimages to her house, and either had their heads bitten off or had their faces painted, depending on her mood. Sadly, she mocked the generations of modern picture-making that followed hers; even Matisse, whom she might have been expected to admire as a poet of private emotion, earned her contempt. She insisted that the new art was all attention-seeking, a dealer’s bubble—which was, of course, exactly what had been said about the Impressionists.
She died in 1926, a year after Sargent, mourned by her nieces and nephews, and largely forgotten by the American art world. It was only with the rebirth of American feminism, in the nineteen-seventies, that her reputation once again began to rise. She had confronted the great, complicated theme that all feminists sooner or later have to confront: in plain English, what do you do about the kids? The big themes turn, as she spotted with her quick intuition, on the question of motherhood. Everything else is negotiable—middle ways can be sought, compromises made. But until the bioengineers carve out that womb in a man’s tummy only women can become mothers, and every woman is faced, sooner or later, with the essential question of submitting or denying. Cassatt denied herself, and made the best and subtlest record we have of what submitting really looks like. She was the first to see that mothers with children were at once women in love and women at work, and that if their love retains some of the joy of sex their work retains all the dignity and awkwardness of labor. In 1911, she wrote to a friend, “Almost all my pictures with children have the mother holding them, would you could hear them talk, their philosophy would astonish you.” It still does. ♦
