Work – in the sense of toil – is about the last thing a 19th-century painter wished to be associated with. Inspiration and success were gifts bestowed on the lucky few – about as easy to grasp as smoke. For Mary Cassatt, however, art was nothing more than work. ‘Effort upon effort,’ is how she described the process of painting to her friend, the collector Louisine Havemeyer.
Pissarro admired her technical skill, Gauguin her charm and strength, but Degas was her true mentor
Still, she produced almost 1,000 works in her lifetime, and Mary Cassatt at Work – a new exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art – tells us how. Spoiler: unswerving determination, ambition and, well, work.
With 130 paintings, pastels, drawings, and prints (36 of these works from the PMA’s own holdings), the exhibition is the largest devoted to Cassatt in the US in more than 25 years, and the first since 1985 in Philadelphia – where she lived for part of her teens and attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
Cassatt is ripe for revisiting. In the century since her death she has been corralled as the painter of children and mothers which, though largely accurate, is reductive and has come to dull and diminish her. This new show looks in other, less hackneyed directions at her work. In sympathetic style, it considers Cassatt’s devout professionalism; the ways in which she laid bare the work of her hands – knowingly leaving signs of manufacture in her pictures – and her perceptive portrayals of the work she observed in the domestic sphere.
The show begins with an introductory room – its few objects spotlit; its dark walls conducive to close looking. ‘A Child’s Bath’ (1880), one of Cassatt’s earliest mother and child scenes, gets straight to the point, two points actually: that women with children – whether mothers or carers – were women at work, and that Cassatt’s deft use of complementary colours and lively brushwork, a dazzle of sharp, quick strokes conveying the wriggling child, were her chief impressionist credentials.
Cassatt studied in Paris for several years in the 1860s, submitting successfully to the Salon, but the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 had forced her to travel back to Philadelphia. It was at this time that her parents refused to further underwrite her artistic career. This only seems to have goaded her into working harder.
Her return to Paris in 1874 coincided with the first impressionist exhibition. She was introduced to Degas in 1877, though she was already aware of his work, admitting to ‘flatten[ing] my nose against the window’ of an exhibition of his pastels on Boulevard Haussmann. Cassatt readily accepted his invitation to join the impressionists, exhibiting with them four times between 1879 and 1886. Pissarro admired her technical skill, Gauguin her charm and strength, but Degas was always her true mentor – and lifelong friend. ‘This is someone who feels the way I do,’ he said.
‘At the Theatre’ (c.1879), meanwhile, demonstrates Cassatt moving seamlessly between mediums – pastel blended with metallic paint, lending a fine iridescence to a theatre-goer’s fan. Cassatt was the first to use the technique and apparently inspired Degas to try the same. It’s often said that Cassatt was born to great riches, but that isn’t quite true. Her father was comfortably off rather than stonkingly wealthy and while, yes, her brother Alexander became president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, at the time Cassatt was starting out, he was still an engineer and raising horses.
All of which is to say that if earning money was at the top of Cassatt’s mind – she was ‘ravenous’ for it, she told a friend – who could blame her? Her parents provided her with a living, but models and a studio they considered ‘an unnecessary expense’.
The catalogue tells us she was particularly effective at promoting impressionism in America. Her dealer Ambrose Collard described how Cassatt ‘laboured for the success of her comrades: Monet, Cézanne, Pissarro, Sisley and the rest… with a kind of frenzy’. She is known to have shaped the taste of many rich East Coast collectors, including her friend Havemeyer, and in doing so arguably brought the movement to America.
Cassatt gives her mothers work-worn hands, something she picked up from Botticelli
The exhibition begins proper by immersing us in the socially stratified Paris of the 1870s and 1880s. The room is cleverly divided into public and private, and conveys the way women inhabited and navigated both realms. You quickly clock how many of Cassatt’s subjects hover between the two: entering, leaving, looking from one space into another. Consider ‘Woman in a Loge’ (1879), for instance, where the subject has her back to the auditorium: its vibrating blaze of pink and gold hits you the moment you walk in. Or ‘Portrait of Madame J’ (1883), in which a subtly lit woman gazes far beyond the frame, too busy with her thoughts to court the approval of the viewer.
Hands are a key theme, our attention drawn to them throughout – in a way that eventually begins to feel a little laboured. That said, I’d never noticed, and loved learning, how Cassatt gives her ‘mothers’ (many were actually paid models) reddened or work-worn hands (see below), something she picked up from Botticelli’s Madonna in the Louvre, whose fingernails are worn down from labouring in the fields.
The Set of Ten, a suite of prints depicting the minutiae of daily life – a dress fitting, someone writing a letter, and so on – that Cassatt developed over the winter of 1890-1, gets its own, richly deserved room. The care she poured into these is extraordinary, the effect of their jewel-bright colour and inventive linework breathtaking. Close up you see her flair for specificity: the nursing mother cradling her baby’s foot, for instance, or the woman with a parasol looking anxiously out of the omnibus window. Degas loved Cassatt’s prints. When he died, there were at least 58 in his collection, including ‘The Maternal Caress’ from the Set of Ten.
Not everything the curators recruit to their cause is perfect, but each room holds much that is either interrogative or beautiful. Perhaps none more so than the final one, which is dedicated to images of rest and repose. I’d head straight for the prints: a trio of delicately drawn heads in one corner, and especially two tiny interiors showing Cassatt’s mother and father reading by lamplight, and her mother reading and sister sewing. Their sense of shared time, the circle of light in the dark, the implied presence of Cassatt sat drawing on the other side of the table are wonderful.
Comments