Working from Paris, she imbued her paintings of domestic life with an American sense of freedom and sheer fun.
For years, I had mixed feelings about Mary Cassatt (1844–1926). After seeing the new survey of her career at the Jacquemart-André Museum in Paris, I’m happy to say I was too hard on her. Superb curatorial vision, a good arrangement of art, and the thrill of so many fresh things, especially from European collections, changed my mind. It’s unusual both to be proven wrong and to feel happy about it.
Cassatt was the only American in the pivotal, nonconformist impressionist shows. She wasn’t there at the beginning, in their first show in 1874, but she joined soon enough, in 1879, and into the 1880s. Until Cassatt, only one other American — her friend James McNeil Whistler — had heralded a European avant-garde movement. I would have said she was a follower, though, not a leader, there in part because she was an assiduous networker and Edgar Degas’s best friend.
Cassatt became a gifted printmaker and pastelist with a sensitive, unusual take on women and children. The figures in her oil paintings, though, can be awkward, with limbs, heads, and torsos sometimes mismatched. Her paint surfaces remind me of cement on a sidewalk. That said, the paintings in the show are the best — no clunkers to be found.
The Jacquemart-André, Paris’s counterpart to the Gardner in Boston, is always a pleasure to visit. The show’s main curator is Nancy Matthews, the distinguished American art historian. No one knows Cassatt better, so when she speaks, everyone needs to listen. Cassatt is due for a reappraisal in Paris, too. Her critical reception there while she was alive was fine but never ecstatic.
I suspected my reservations about Cassatt would be confirmed when I walked into the show. There were two portraits, one of Cassatt by Degas and the other by Cassatt of herself. It’s a bad sign when an artist’s survey begins with better work by another artist, but there’s a point. Cassatt’s self-portrait from about 1877 presents a proper young woman with commendable posture. She looks earnest to a fault. She didn’t love Degas’s portrait, done about the same time. There, she leans forward, as if in conversation, inquisitive and intelligent, more handsome than pretty, looking older, with as much Pittsburgh steel in her — she was born there — as Philadelphia Main Line, where her family moved after her father became rich. Degas was far closer to the mark.
Cassatt didn’t like the term “impressionist.” She preferred to be called “independent,” as did Degas, because it suggested a point of view rather than a particular style. It’s a better word for her. Cassatt was indifferent to impressionist theories of color and light. She never painted pure landscapes. Little Girl in a Blue Armchair, from 1878 and her premiere at impressionist salons, has some of the standard impressionist bells and whistles: loose brushwork; a bright, intense, and even high-strung, palette; and a decidedly unguarded moment. It’s French but also American and a uniquely Cassatt production. It’s one of many hard-to-get loans in the show and a great picture it is.
The little girl is carefree and uninhibited, a creature of nature much like her dozing dog, though she’s the wild one. The strip of tartan is a nice touch, a vivid contrast and dash of the Celt. Even the furniture defies order. The child is a distinct, empowered, unsupervised individual rather than an emblem of social class, a clothes pony, or an adult-in-training. She has agency. What she’s doing is anyone’s guess. She looks like she’s just come from a family lunch after which she drained the dregs in everyone’s wine glass. Here Cassatt tips her American hand. Europeans, even the most chauvinistic, often have the same grudging answer if asked what they admire most in Americans: “their freedom.”
The show develops Cassatt as an artist through a combination of her art, her biography, and the trends of her day. It’s the best of art history. She lived in Paris but was always close to her American family, among them her brother, the railroad magnet and Penn Station developer Alexander Cassatt. Her best works from the early 1880s were casual family portraits. Artist and sitter in Cup of Tea from 1880 benefit from mutual warm feeling. It’s Cassatt’s sister, Lydia, poised, soft, and pink, and caught in a moment of relaxed pleasure.
Cassatt lived alone and never married. She had a strong personality and was immensely social and warm. She never thought of herself as anything but an American and created in her home a welcoming place for visiting, rich Americans, for her American nieces and nephews, and for the children of her French friends, all of whom she mothered and mentored. It’s not a shock, then, to see how easily and comfortably she portrays children.
She had a philosophical approach, too. Children at play often appear in impressionist pictures, and in Cassatt’s work they squirm in their mother’s arms, demand, expect, and enjoy cuddling, and wear some fun, funky hats. Children were, after all, a staple of everyday life, and everyday, bourgeois life was at the heart of impressionism. In the 1880s and 1890s, we see a revival of spirituality in French modern art anchored in part by a Virgin-and-Child fetish. Symbolist painting, for instance, was infused with religious feeling. I doubt Cassatt bought it, but she had market savvy and was naturally absorbent. Cassatt’s mothers and children might have been tagged as “Modern Madonnas,” but at their best, the kids are adorably gussied up and too potentially naughty. And lots of Cassatt’s children are single figures, sans mama. They’re always different, too, with no formula and certainly no spiritual dogma.
Cassatt sought what she called “the gist” of her sitters, and to her this was a sign of her independence. She was happy to abandon a ponderous obsession with tight finish; pastel, with its soft, gauzy lines, really doesn’t allow it. Children are creatures of the moment, and the younger they are, the better the gist.
Cassatt was a taste maker. Starting in the 1880s, she steered American collectors to the studios of her impressionist friends, whose work they bought while the paint was wet. Cassatt also championed Spanish Golden Age painting, especially that of Goya, so important Spanish pictures crossed the sea as well. Those worthy topics are for other shows. Here, Cassatt as an artist is front and center, and what a pleasure greets the eye.
