The Forgotten Radicalism of Mary Cassatt

On December 1, 1936, a group of artists stormed the New York City office of the Works Progress Administration. They were protesting budget cuts to the Federal Art Project, a New Deal program that employed artists to create works for public spaces across the country. Of the 219 who were arrested, several gave fake names to the police, offering aliases such as Cézanne, Picasso, and Van Gogh—painters who had once staged their own kind of revolution. Among the jailed protesters was the painter Lee Krasner, who in the subsequent decade would play a central role in the Abstract Expressionist movement (and also marry Jackson Pollock). When arrested, she too used a famous artist’s name in lieu of her own: Mary Cassatt. Later, Krasner would joke that she “didn’t have a big selection, you know,” of women artists’ names from which to choose. But Krasner, who had pursued formal art training, knew the history of her craft. Although Cassatt is now most remembered for her sentimental-seeming images of mothers and children, she had also mounted a revolution. Cassatt’s contemporaries knew her as a visionary painter of daily life, one who confronted the enigmatic complexities of being a woman in the modern world. The only American to exhibit with the Impressionists, Cassatt astounded audiences with her radical compositions, bold color choices, and disregard for conventional standards of beauty. French critics regularly noted her virile (“manly”) technique and the deeply psychological nature of her art. As the Impressionists rose to prominence, so did she. Only later, in the 1890s, did Cassatt create her enduring maternal scenes—but those works, too, stressed not tender family ties but the hard work of child care. Cassatt’s paintings, pastels, and prints adorn the knickknacks that fill shop displays in the days leading up to Mother’s Day. Owing to this association, and unlike most women artists who came before or after her, Cassatt has retained a rare degree of name recognition. But it has come at a price: The Cassatt on the postcards that I, too, once gave my mother has been sweetened and softened, packaged into an example of what women artists could, and could not, achieve. As a result, a full century after her death—marked this year with an exhibition of her works at the National Gallery of Art—Cassatt is both one of the most familiar and misunderstood artists of our time. Cassatt was born in 1844, near Pittsburgh, to a prosperous family. From 1851 to 1855, as her family traveled to France and Germany, she obtained an informal artistic education by visiting museums and, likely, the 1855 Exposition Universelle in Paris. Early on, she told her parents that she wanted to be an artist. “I would almost rather see you dead,” her father replied, but Cassatt would not be discouraged. Cassatt enrolled as a teenager at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. As a woman, her options were limited. Although men could study from nude models—long hailed as a pillar of artistic education—women could not. Still, timing was on her side. In 1860, Cassatt and her peers formed their own life-drawing class, in which they posed (while clothed) for one another. That same year, Cassatt became part of the first wave of women allowed to attend the academy’s anatomy lectures. After the end of the Civil War, American women sought out careers in the arts as never before. Thousands poured into art schools across the Eastern Seaboard, where female enrollment soon eclipsed that of men. Others ventured abroad. In the mid-1860s, accompanied by her mother, Cassatt became one of the hundreds of American women sailing to Paris annually to study art. She quickly secured lessons with a slew of established (male) painters in their private studios, harboring a new goal: to “paint better than the old masters.” In 1868, Cassatt had a work, The Mandolin Player, accepted to the Paris Salon—Europe’s most prestigious juried show, and a lodestar for artists who came from abroad. On the surface, the canvas paid homage to a French and Dutch painting tradition showing well-off women with musical accoutrements. But Cassatt upended this convention by painting a subject who was clearly from the lower classes in an ambiguous setting, hardly performing for pleasure. Here, we see the seeds of what would become Cassatt’s signature approach: capturing moments rarely placed on display while refusing to cater to idealized notions of feminine beauty. Soon, a new circle of artists came to Cassatt’s attention. In 1874, the group now known as the Impressionists held their first exhibition, rebelling against the perceived conservatism of the Salon and its jury’s repeated rejection of many of their works. They would hold eight shows through 1886, advancing an aesthetic prioritizing unblended colors and loose, visible brushstrokes that sought to capture the ephemerality of modern life. Cassatt was especially captivated by the work of Edgar Degas. She advised her friend Louisine Elder (later Havemeyer) to purchase one of his works, Rehearsal of the Ballet. Elder became Degas’ first—and quickly his most influential—American patron; Rehearsal is said to have been the first Impressionist work exhibited in the United States, in 1878. Cassatt was already on Degas’ radar too. In 1874, on seeing her painting Ida at the Salon, he had marveled, “This is someone who feels as I do.” The two artists finally met in 1877. Cassatt had recently faced Salon rejections herself and was eager to work more independently; Degas invited her to exhibit with the Impressionists. “I agreed gladly,” she recalled. “I hated conventional art. I was beginning to live.” Starting in 1879, Cassatt would participate in four of the Impressionists’ final five exhibitions—becoming, alongside the painters Berthe Morisot and Marie Bracquemond, one of a handful of women to be featured. Her approach fit well with the group. She shared their interest in capturing the effects of fleeting moments, yet set herself apart by focusing on the workings of the mind. For her first Impressionist show, Cassatt chose several works that asked what it meant to be a woman at different stages of life, probing how real people felt. Take the most radical piece she showed that year, Little Girl in a Blue Armchair. A young girl reclines on an overstuffed chair, one of many pieces of furniture that crowd a room with no apparent order. A small Brussels griffon (likely Cassatt’s own pet) lounges to her side. By allowing us to view the girl from both below and above—an unusual painterly perspective, difficult to pull off—Cassatt has left unclear whether we are experiencing the scene as a child or an adult. The girl is meticulously dressed, the plaid scarf around her waist matching her socks and hair ribbon. But she herself does not seem to care. Nor does she pose. If anything, she appears bored. We see the malaise of childhood, a girl on the cusp of adolescence but not quite there, uninterested in whatever she is meant to be or do. Cassatt made this emotional state worthy of representation—worthy of art. Unusual in a society that rewarded cultivated elegance, Cassatt emphasized that women did not always want to be on view. In two other works she exhibited in 1879, she depicted the theater, a favorite Impressionist locale. Unlike her peers, however, she stressed the fraught nature of being a woman in such a voyeuristic space, where audience members were part of the visual spectacle. In one of these works, an oil painting, a woman (likely her sister, Lydia) sits in a fashionable pink dress, allowing an admirer’s gaze. In the other, a pastel, Cassatt’s subject turns away from us, gripping a large fan that threatens to hide her features entirely. The prior year, yet another theater scene by her hand—In the Loge—had become the second Impressionist painting exhibited in the United States. In it, a woman peers at the stage through binoculars, resting her elbow on the balcony edge, intent on watching the perf…