A May exhibit at the National Gallery of Art will explore the relationship between Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas, as new evidence suggests a bond of mutual admiration and influence, rather than teacher and student.
Image right:
Edgar Degas. “Mary Cassatt at the Louvre: The Paintings Gallery,” 1885; pastel over softground etching, drypoint, aquatint, and etching on tan paper; plate: 30.5 x 12.7 cm. (12 x 5 in.); sheet: 31.3 x 13.7 cm. (12 5/16 x 5 3/8 in.). The Art Institute of Chicago
Almost microscopic exhibit ‘Degas/Cassatt’ plumbs artists’ affinities and influences.
From the Washington Post By Philip Kennicott,, April 29
In 1879, Edgar Degas made a charcoal and pastel image of two
female figures, one standing with a book in her hands, the other seen from
behind, leaning slightly on the staff of her closed umbrella. These are likely
two visions of the artist Mary Cassatt, a friend, colleague and co-conspirator
with Degas in Parisian impressionist circles.
The drawing is one of some 70 works by Degas and Cassatt in
the National Gallery of Art’s “Degas/Cassatt show,” which opens May 11. It is
also one of the most concentrated and evocative in an exhibition that aims to
explore the relationship between the two artists and remedy many of the popular
misconceptions about their alliance. It was not, according to Kimberly A.
Jones, associate curator for French paintings, a romantic relationship, nor a
pedagogical one, but a relationship of equals to the extent possible between a
younger American woman and an older, established and often acerbic French man.
“I think they had a wonderful platonic relationship, a
tremendous professional relationship, and they admired one another tremendously,”
Jones said in an interview earlier this year. The problem for anyone teasing
out that relationship, however, is the lack of written evidence. Degas didn’t
keep Cassatt’s letters, and Cassatt apparently destroyed his. The testimony of
mutual acquaintances offers some data, and the pictures themselves, when
explored with consideration to chronology, are another avenue for speculation.
The 1879 pastel reveals both the promise and the pitfalls of
this approach. If this is indeed an image of Cassatt, we see two very different
interpretations of her. The pastel is listed in the exhibition catalog as “Two
Studies of Mary Cassatt at the Louvre,” and it is one of several related
drawings, prints and paintings that show Cassatt, or a woman who resembles her,
at the Louvre, or similar museum or gallery.
Degas’s obsession in these images seems to have something to
do with the difference between an authentic and a mediated relationship to art.
The Cassatt figure who faces the viewer holds her book high,
as if she is glancing back and forth between an image on the page and a
painting on the wall. The posture suggests a studious amateur, dutifully
mastering her art history. The other Cassatt, who stands with her back to the
viewer, leaning slightly on her umbrella, is by contrast a woman utterly at
home in the art gallery, confronting the past as an equal, engaging art as a
participant. She is jaunty, aware of her beauty and completely unintimidated by
her surroundings. Degas made several iterations of this image, and in some of
them the contrast is even more heightened: The reading woman is sitting,
looking perhaps enviously at the standing figure, who is leaning even more
provocatively on her umbrella. We can’t see her face, but her self-assurance
has taken on cinematic proportions, as if the next shot in this scene will
frame her like Garbo, and she’ll deliver a one-liner that establishes her femme
fatale bona fides.
The pictures complicate our understanding of the generic
misogyny of 19th-century Frenchmen such as Degas, as well as his own particular
and prickly misogyny, manifested in his famous assertion that women artists
couldn’t understand style. Degas is best remembered for his ballet dancers, his
actresses and prostitutes, women spied upon, seen in various states of undress,
bathing, primping and readying themselves for consumption by the male gaze. But
with Cassatt, who served him as a model on multiple occasions, he discovers a
woman who both physically embodies style and mastered it on the artistic level.
She engages with the same art that engaged him with perfect ease, and in a
basic, literal way, she leaves him behind: She turns her back on the artist, to
concentrate entirely on the art that surrounds her.
The spectator and the stage
These images also demonstrate the challenge the curators
face when trying to place Degas and Cassatt on equal terms. Cassatt isn’t just
a fellow artist and colleague of Degas, she was also a subject for his art, in
a way that Degas wasn’t for Cassatt. And while they inhabited the same social
milieu and maintained a complex friendship, they were not equally privy to the
full spectrum of French society. Both Degas and Cassatt could paint women of
society and the fashionable bourgeois, but Degas could also paint women
backstage at the opera, in theater dressing rooms, in the grimy boudoirs of a
brothel — spaces Cassatt could never visit.
“Cassatt really did have a strong sense of propriety, and
she was very conscious of her reputation,” Jones said. “Already being an
artist, she was breaking a lot of rules, but she did not want to be seen as
someone who was not serious and not respectful.” The exhibition attempts to
demonstrate these restrictions by contrasting the two artist’s subtly different
relationships to public space.
“You can see she does wonderful theater scenes, but always
from the loge,” Jones said. “She’s never down backstage like Degas could be,
and that is certainly one of the reasons why so much of her work is focused on
interior, domestic scenes, because that was a world in which she did not have
to worry about access.”
And so curious quirks emerge. Both Cassatt and Degas paint
people at the opera, but Cassatt never shows us the stage. Cassatt’s women,
often beautiful but with vacant faces, are looking and being looked at the same
time; by omitting the theatrical stage, where the ballerinas are dancing and
sopranos singing, Cassatt reminds us that “proper” women are as scrutinized in
public as actresses are before the footlights.
Degas, by contrast, often conflates the stage with the
viewer. In one 1878-80 image, “At the Theatre: Woman with a Fan,” a woman in
the audience is linked to the performers by striking similarities in the
rendering of their hair; the fan in the title makes for an ironically flimsy
barrier between stage and spectator.
Challenges to custom
Any exhibition that presents Cassatt and Degas together
inevitably becomes an exhibition about Cassatt, because she is a problematic artist,
strange, unpredictable, sometimes not quite in control of her idiosyncrasies.
Jones said that this exhibition will help push audiences past their usual sense
of Cassatt as a painter of women and babies, fleshy toddlers and buxom maternal
figures.
“I think Cassatt is going to be the big surprise for most
people,” Jones said. “We’re accustomed to knowing that Degas was avant-garde
and edgy, but people don’t think of Cassatt that way. People think of her as
the painter of mothers and children, and they’re very beautiful, but in fact,
except for works in the very last section . . . there are no mothers and
children. It’s other subjects.”
That includes a couple of small nudes, in which Cassatt’s
engagement with Degas seems at its most direct. But there will be other
challenges, too, the ones that always dog Cassatt’s reputation. Are her people
really, fully people? Is the little girl on the motor car just bored, or is her
face poorly rendered? Are the father and son in a sumptuous 1884 painting
intently looking at something outside the picture frame, or are their faces
somewhat ineptly rendered? Is that a touch of treacle and sentiment that creeps
into the later images, from the 1890s, of women in gardens, plucking fruit or
holding children?
“Degas/Cassatt” draws on the gallery’s ample holdings of
both artists and includes material borrowed from other museums. It features two
of the biggest name draws in the museum world but is in fact intended to be a
focused, almost microscopic exhibition about details, affinities and possible
borrowings and influence. Visitors who simply want to revel in the color of
Cassatt and the salacious delights of Degas won’t be disappointed. Among other
things, it includes a newly restored Cassatt canvas, “Little Girl in a Blue Armchair.”
Seen earlier this year in the gallery’s conservation lab, the painting is
stunning, and will likely be the star of the show. But the intention is to dig
deeper than that, and the more one tends to dig into Cassatt’s oeuvre, the
stranger it seems.
“Degas/Cassatt” will be on view at the National Gallery of
Art through Oct. 5.
For more information, visit www.nga.gov
