Mary Cassatt: The Impressionist Who Painted The Mind

When the 21-year-old American artist Mary Cassatt arrived in Paris at the end of 1865, she was stepping into the epicenter of the most momentous revolution in painting since the Italian Renaissance. In May of that year, Édouard Manet exhibited Olympia at the Paris Salon, and it absolutely scandalized the public who crowded around it laughing and hurling vicious insults. In a salon that was full of female nudes, it wasn't really the subject matter that caused the outrage so much as the way it was depicted.

[music] Manet's paintings had an overwhelming immediacy with their visible brushwork, flattened figures, and collapsed perspective, techniques he developed to capture to match the immediacy and the flux of contemporary life. You see, since the Renaissance, it was generally agreed that the surface of a painting should be conceived of as a transparent window through which an observer could appreciate a seemingly three-dimensional subject rendered according to the conventions of modeling and perspective.

[music] But, to Manet, there was something dishonest about these conventions. Perspective is an illusion. The picture plane is not a window. It's a two-dimensional surface covered in paint, and Manet's work refuses to let us deny that. But, there was a cost to these innovations, too, and you can see that cost in the blank stares of Manet's subjects. As art historian Pierre Schneider puts it, psychological depth suffers from the loss of the recesses opened up by perspective. Trapped in the narrowing gap, the figures of Manet's pictures became flattened, [music] disoriented.

Was there a way to preserve psychological depth without [music] reverting to stale conventions? The artist who solved this puzzle [music] better than any other was Mary Cassatt.

Hailing from an upper-middle-class family in Pennsylvania, Cassatt studied painting in Philadelphia before moving permanently to Europe, where she honed her craft under different teachers in various places and soon got a number of her canvases accepted to the Paris Salon. Her interest from the very beginning was in people. Even in her early genre painting, she's looking for ways to give her figures an inner vitality. The turning point in her career came in 1877 when Edgar Degas invited her to exhibit with the Impressionists, a group of artists who, like Manet, had been rebuffed by Salon juries for pursuing radical anti-academic styles. Back in '74, they decided to pool their resources and launch their own renegade exhibition.

Cassatt was thrilled to be asked to join them. "I had already recognized who my true masters were," she told her biographer. "I admired Manet, Courbet, and Degas. I hated conventional art. I began to live." In 1879, the Impressionists held their fourth exhibition, Cassatt's first. She exhibited 12 works and was widely praised [music] by critics. If you compare a painting like The Loge, which you can see at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., with her early work, it's clear how much Cassatt's style evolved in proximity to the avant-garde. Just look at the difference in palettes, at how much brighter and more colorful the latter painting is, how much looser the brushwork. Like Manet, she's dispensing with traditional modeling and perspective. In fact, her choice of a mirror as background is a brilliant way to literally and figuratively foreground the deceptive nature of perspective. Like Degas, she's exploring the changing effects of artificial light on flesh and fabric, and she's experimenting with off-kilter viewing angles. But Cassatt isn't just adopting these techniques for the sake of it. She's putting them to work in service of her deeper interest in psychology. She realizes that by not allowing the viewer to get drawn into the narrative space opened [music] up by perspective, this new style of painting actually makes it possible to depict the subtle psychology of everyday [music] life, a psychology uncontaminated by allegory or sentimentality. The trick was to combine the immediacy of Manet's methods with a meticulous observation of posture, gesture, expression, and activity. Look at the way the slouched posture of this child amidst a sea of blue suggests her overwhelming boredom, or how this woman leaning forward intently looking through her opera glasses is imbued with a spark of inner life that is nowhere to be found in the similar painting by Renoir, where the woman is merely an object to be seen.

Cassatt's four exhibitions with the Impressionists established her as a force in the French art world, but she wasn't done evolving. In the 1880s, she found the subject matter that would become her trademark, the mother and child. Why this motif? Well, Cassatt never married or had children, so the urge to psychoanalyze her long-term focus on the subject has proved irresistible to some critics, but that road, I think, is [music] a dead end. To me, what the mother and child painting signify is a breakthrough in Cassatt's aesthetic journey. What she figured out is that the psychology enabled by these new techniques really comes alive in the interaction between figures, and there are few subjects that allow for the sheer variety of physical and emotional intimacies as a mother with her child. In Cassatt's canvases, the children with an awkwardness so true to life wriggle and lean and wrap around mothers who are deeply [music] engaged in bathing, feeding, carrying, listening. The compositions are as sophisticated as Raphael's Madonna and Child paintings, but Cassatt frees motherhood from its biblical connotations and also from the idealized but ultimately repressive mythology of motherhood that was so prevalent in the Victorian [music] era.

What we see in Cassatt's paintings for the first time in the history of [music] art is the real work and the real joy of parenting. If you are a parent, you'll find [music] as I do, moments here that are achingly resonant. But you don't need to be a parent to be moved by these works because, remember, they are psychological interactions. There are two equally important subjectivities here and all of us, at some point, were children. [music] In the mother and child paintings, Cassatt is precise in detail and observation while always reaching for the universal. She was helped in that regard by an exhibition of Japanese woodcut prints that came to Paris in 1890, which showed her how to emphasize the dignity [music] and monumentality of the mother and child relationship, as Jane Van Buren [music] puts it. The simplicity and flatness of the style enhances the power of the emotions and releases them from social history, custom, [music] and myth. The color prints that this show inspired Cassatt to make are highlights of her career and of the form itself. When Cassatt arrives at The Boating Party in 1894, [music] which I think is her masterpiece, you can see all the study and experimentation of 30 years united [music] in a painting that only she could make. It's a canvas in conversation with this one by Manet from two decades before, and comparing them shows what she learned and what she added to his revolution. As we've seen before from Manet, everything here pushes forward onto the picture plane, accentuated by the profile view of the woman and by the wall of water behind the boat with no horizon to indicate depth. It's arresting. The frame is cropped in a way reminiscent of Japanese prints or photography, and the brushwork is loose and impressionistic, especially in the woman's dress, which echoes the water. The figures presumably have some sort of relationship, but, as is typical of Manet, they are aloof, uncommunicative. [music] Now, look at the figures in The Boating Party. Everything in this composition emphasizes the psychological energy moving between these three people. Like Manet, Cassatt gives her own crop snapshot a two-dimensional quality, choosing a high viewing angle to push the horizon up to the top of the frame, which puts a similar

Salon. Her interest from the very beginning was in people. Even in her early genre painting, she's looking for ways to give her figures an inner vitality. The turning point in her career came in 1877 when Edgar Degas invited her to exhibit with the

Impressionists, a group of artists who, like Manet, had been rebuffed by Salon juries for pursuing radical anti-academic styles. Back in '74, they decided to pool their resources and launch their own renegade exhibition.

Cassatt was thrilled to be asked to join them. "I had already recognized who my true masters were," she told her biographer. "I admired Manet, Courbet, and Degas. I hated conventional art. I began to live." In 1879, the Impressionists held their fourth

exhibition, Cassatt's first. She exhibited 12 works and was widely praised [music] by critics. If you compare a painting like The Loge, which you can see at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., with her early work, it's clear how much Cassatt's

style evolved in proximity to the avant-garde. Just look at the difference in palettes, at how much brighter and more colorful the latter painting is, how much looser the brushwork. Like Manet, she's dispensing with traditional modeling and perspective. In fact, her

choice of a mirror as background is a brilliant way to literally and figuratively foreground the deceptive nature of perspective. Like Degas, she's exploring the changing effects of artificial light on flesh and fabric, and she's experimenting with off-kilter viewing angles. But Cassatt isn't just

adopting these techniques for the sake of it. She's putting them to work in service of her deeper interest in psychology. She realizes that by not allowing the viewer to get drawn into the narrative space opened [music] up by

perspective, this new style of painting actually makes it possible to depict the subtle psychology of everyday [music] life, a psychology uncontaminated by allegory or sentimentality. The trick was to combine the immediacy of Manet's methods with a meticulous observation of

posture gesture expression and activity. Look at the way the slouched posture of this child amidst a sea of blue suggests her overwhelming boredom, or how this woman leaning forward intently looking through her opera glasses is imbued with a spark of inner

life that is nowhere to be found in the similar painting by Renoir, where the woman is merely an object to be seen.

Cassatt's four exhibitions with the Impressionists established her as a force in the French art world, but she wasn't done evolving. In the 1880s, she found the subject matter that would become her trademark, the mother and child. Why this motif? Well, Cassatt

never married or had children, so the urge to psychoanalyze her long-term focus on the subject has proved irresistible to some critics, but that road, I think, is [music] a dead end. To me, what the mother and child painting

signify is a breakthrough in Cassatt's aesthetic journey. What she figured out is that the psychology enabled by these new techniques really comes alive in the interaction between figures, and there are few subjects that allow for the sheer variety of physical and emotional

intimacies as a mother with her child. In Cassatt's canvases, the children with an awkwardness so true to life wriggle and lean and wrap around mothers who are deeply [music] engaged in bathing, feeding, carrying, listening. The compositions are as sophisticated as

Raphael's Madonna and Child paintings, but Cassatt frees motherhood from its biblical connotations and also from the idealized but ultimately repressive mythology of motherhood that was so prevalent in the Victorian [music] era.

What we see in Cassatt's paintings for the first time in the history of [music] art is the real work and the real joy of parenting. If you are a parent, you'll find [music] as I do, moments here that are achingly

resonant. But you don't need to be a parent to be moved by these works because, remember, they are psychological interactions. There are two equally important subjectivities here and all of us, at some point, were children. [music] In the mother and

child paintings, Cassatt is precise in detail and observation while always reaching for the universal. She was helped in that regard by an exhibition of Japanese woodcut prints that came to Paris in 1890, which showed her how to emphasize the dignity [music]

and monumentality of the mother and child relationship, as Jane Van Buren [music] puts it. The simplicity and flatness of the style enhances the power of the emotions and releases them from social history, custom, [music] and myth. The color prints that this

show inspired Cassatt to make are highlights of her career and of the form itself. When Cassatt arrives at The Boating Party in 1894, [music] which I think is her masterpiece, you can see all the study and experimentation of 30

years united [music] in a painting that only she could make. It's a canvas in conversation with this one by Manet from two decades before, and comparing them shows what she learned and what she added to his revolution. As we've seen

before from Manet, everything here pushes forward onto the picture plane, accentuated by the profile view of the woman and by the wall of water behind the boat with no horizon to indicate depth. It's arresting. The frame is cropped in a way reminiscent of Japanese

prints or photography, and the brushwork is loose and impressionistic, especially in the woman's dress, which echoes the water. The figures presumably have some sort of relationship, but, as is typical of Manet, they are aloof, uncommunicative. [music] Now, look at

the figures in the boating party. Everything in this composition emphasizes the psychological energy moving between these three people. Like Manet, Cassatt gives her own crop snapshot a two-dimensional quality, choosing a high viewing angle to push the horizon up to the top of the frame,

which puts a similar wall of water behind the figures, bringing them forward. There is some impressionist brushwork in the water and in the mother's dress, but in terms of color design, the influence of her print work is obvious. This is a painting made up

of large blocks of color. The ultramarine of the boatman's jacket, the cobalt blue of his sash, the mint green [music] of the sail, the pink of the child's dress, the white and yellow of the boat. These bold colors give the

painting that monumentality Van Buren wrote [music] about. They also create strong lines, so many of which draw our focus to the mother and daughter in the center of the canvas, where [music] Cassatt creates a ball of tension. The

mother's face is calm, if alert, but that calmness is betrayed by the little girl who is wriggling in her lap. I know that wriggle very well, and I also know the strength that would be needed in this arm to hold her child in an awkward

position. The pressure of that grasp is echoed and impinged on by the boatman's hand on the oar. The boatman with his broad back, that dark block of ultramarine looming in the foreground, adds a touch of menace to the scene that

is heightened by the frightened look in the girl's eyes as she [music] watches him. Maybe her fear is why she's wriggling. Cassatt twists the boatman's head just enough so that we get a sliver of his eye looking back at her, but his

expression is a mystery. The mother, meanwhile, watches the boatman, too, but apprehensive or not, flustered or not, she has to remain composed for the sake of her child, something that all mothers and all parents know. It's a testament

to Cassatt's mastery that she can visualize that composure and also the [music] effort it takes to maintain it.

As her mostly male peers ventured into ever more experimental, ever more abstract territory, Mary Cassatt kept looking for ways to paint interiority.

[music] However much Manet and his successors shifted their focus to a painting [music] surface, she knew that there would always be depth, inex haustible depth, in the human mind.

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