After visiting the Mary Cassatt exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, I know what it looks like to think. You see her figures thinking, then they are blank-faced, then they think beyond the blank.
The show introduces Cassatt to a new generation. The curators, Jennifer A. Thompson and Laurel Garber, wanted to get closer to who Cassatt was, to how she wanted to be remembered, and to the legacy of her seemingly serene paintings. They do so by focusing on process. Cassatt, they tell us, was obsessed with work. She constantly worked, toiling to achieve her “casual” auras with light, glimmering colors, modern movement, and, above all, the private pensiveness of her women and her children.
Cassatt’s paintings convey a simplicity—here, now playful greens; here, now a girl in a buggy—but the show reveals that her method is by no means simple. It’s the same arduous careful fight for maximal directness that we see in figures like Marguerite Duras, Yasujiro Ozu, and Clarice Lispector. Cassatt achieved hers by changing mediums; by experimenting with colors; and by being perversely drawn to small-fry subject matter, then mining it from all angles. She mastered the work of printing too: bursting, colorful aquatints and fine drypoint are on display in her glorious “Set of Ten” (1891), 10 Japanese woodblock-inspired prints of Parisian women bathing, sending letters, caretaking.
After being in the presence of so many Cassatts at once—little Françoise reading, ladies at their toilette, boys strangled by loving arms, two girls peering into a map with invisible-to-us borders and oceans—you realize what it is to paint with levity. This does not mean the subject matter, children and opera-boxes and sleepy afternoons, is light.
Throughout the years, Cassatt has borne many labels, which are seldom useful when grappling with the material depth of one of her canvases. “Impressionist.” “Woman painter.” “American.” “Upper-middle-class white.” “Sentimentalist.” “Suffragette.” All these she certainly was. Yet what grabs us is how fierce her battle is for the shade of a dress: raspberry pink. It takes a lot of observation and patience on our part for the mourning-black of a stoic to emerge in Portrait of Madame J (1883)—blurry, as the stoic’s face is, behind a veil, concealing her grief behind still, bleary eyes.
But Cassatt’s interest in work—which means physical labor, yes, and also the hard work of noticing the scrunch of an ignored child’s face as she expresses desire for she-knows-not-what—is not the writhing, heavy work of Paul Cézanne, who was bitterly unsatisfied with his blocky, huffing-puffing apples and his apple-y Madame Cézannes until the end. Nor is it work in the Socialist/Realist sense of Gustave Courbet’s tillers and Jean-François Millet’s gleaners. Cassatt is mesmerized by an everyday labor hidden among the chaise longues, the work it takes to make sure a baby doesn’t die before its time. In other words: the work of attention and love. Perhaps this sort of love is overbearing. Good.
Deborah Solomon claims in her New York Times review of this show that Cassatt “belongs to the second tier of Impressionists” and that she “cannot be said to inhabit the same exalted plane as Degas or Manet.” This ranking business! It’s loathsome, tiresome. Arrêt!
This hierarchy is as boring as the insistence that Cassatt’s subject is as simple as mothers and children, that she knew what it was to be a mother and to draw it (she never had kids), or that “nothing,” outside the moneyed sphere, happens in her work. It is too easy to chide Cassatt for dabbing her birchwood brushes in one hand while stirring her silver teaspoons in the other. Yes, she was of the upper-middle-class American aristocracy, a stockbroker’s daughter. “Ordinary” bourgeois scenes: these were her specialty, that was the weird milieu she knew well. And she keeps it weird, perverting the ordinary. What she does with the subject, like her fellow Americans Henry James and Edith Wharton, is to take a limited perspective on the world and elevate the touched objects and buried feelings piling up around her as the source for unexpectedly subtle rhapsodies of a hierophantic order. Cassatt’s order transcends the mere social mores that serve as the downfall of a Countess Olenska or a Daisy Miller, but not of little Françoise, her child neighbor, reading.
Cassatt moves through her paintings without the touching neuroses of a James, without his curling smoke trails of clauses or qualifying commas. James is nervous he will never perfectly unravel the figure in the carpet, doomed completist that he is; Cassatt is assured, even comfortable, in the incomplete, the unknown of her thinking women. If we want to invest our own thoughts in the trauma of the everyday, if we want to meditate on our own money-love woes, our muttered complaints about cramped arms, we can go to Cassatt’s mother-like nursemaids bearing their baby-like crosses. These aren’t mothers or babies we see. They are the politics of care. Result: we don’t sweat words. We lose ourselves in pigments and blank space.
I keep returning to two paintings. The first is of her child neighbor, Françoise in a Round-Backed Chair, Reading (1909). It is an epitome of meditation. It’s not as radical, formally, as the other Cassatts, which typically render a face or hand in full, sumptuous detail, while leaving the rest of the body and background in a modernist, sketch-like state of incompletion. Nevertheless, Cassatt’s sublime incompletion rears its head when we realize that the book jacket on Françoise’s book is lost, so we can’t tell what she’s reading. Nor can we be sure that she’s even reading it: her eyes look off into an unseen corner of the frame, perhaps into our space. What does she see, if anything? Françoise wanders away from us, from the room, into her own thoughts, solemn yet full of gaiety.
The second is The Map (1890), a black-and-gray drypoint print in which two girls examine a map. Cassatt renders the map as a single line, so that the girls look down on what seems like not a map at all, but a blank piece of paper, even a table. The girls decode the map through a joint effort. And they do it in Cassatt’s unfolding calm.
Cassatt was prolific, creating many mini-worlds, each granularly distinct; within her houses, I want to sit in a chair and daydream. She realizes the advice Henry James theorized in his own preface to Portrait of a Lady—namely, to “place the center of the subject in the young woman’s own consciousness,” in order to “get as interesting and as beautiful a difficulty as you could wish.” Cassatt, too, captures the unceasing mystery of a face that knows it can’t be known. You feel like you finally, paradoxically, know what it is to be with someone. To lie on the divan as you read and watch them read, or weave and watch them weave, or vibe and watch them be blank-minded, doing “nothing” (quite a whole lot, in fact), meditating. And feeling satisfied with this fragment.