Mary Cassatt was an artist of unfailing taste and seriousness. Sometimes she painted daringly, often she drew beautifully, always she made prints exquisitely.
But Cassatt also concentrated on female subjects that express the narrow range of activities open to even the most independent 19th Century women. And that ultimately will determine how viewers react to her large retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago, for it’s what causes 90 paintings, drawings, pastels and prints to have a decidedly small impact.
Despite a questing mind and a loathing for all forms of provincialism, Cassatt emerges from the show as an artist who would have been better served by about half the present number of pieces. Her real achievements as a painter and printmaker are not enough to meet the expectations aroused by a grandly scaled retrospective.
The Institute’s sequence of shows devoted to Impressionist masters ends on a higher artistic note than the one provided by the 1997 survey of portraits by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, but viewers should not expect the depth or breadth indicated by earlier exhibitions for Edgar Degas and Claude Monet. Cassatt was not that kind of artist. In fact, she was not much of an Impressionist, though Degas invited her to show with them. Cassatt’s work seldom explores the quick perceptions, outdoor light effects and changing landscapes that were central to the outputs of other Impressionist painters.
Her training — in France, Italy, Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands — gave a reverence for the Old Masters and, especially, their drawing. Degas said of her draftsmanship: “I will not admit that a woman can draw so well.” And, like him, she exercised that skill on the human figure, creating incidental portraits of family members, friends and, most tellingly, children.
Cassatt’s portraits were not commercially motivated, like Renoir’s deadly commissions that generalized personality while flattering the sitter. Her paintings were disinterested “scenes from modern life” in which one or more figures, generally female, would be engaged in some domestic activity, such as reading, drinking tea or sewing.
The artist destroyed her student works, so the first full room in the exhibition, which is devoted to Italian and Spanish subjects, already indicates more than competent handling. Some of these pictures plus the symbolic ones at the end of the show are the only paintings on view with narrative implications, suggesting anecdotes or allegories. All the rest depict incidents from the everyday experienced by upper-class women — and, occasionally, men — living in France.
As Cassatt drew more solidly than most of the Impressionists, so did she construct her compositions more rigorously. Little about them is casual or left to chance. The majority of her paintings have strong geometric underpinnings. They bespeak deliberation, not haste.
One of her early masterpieces is the 1878 “Portrait of a Lady,” which is rigorous in the extreme. The use of a few related colors — white, gray, black, yellow, gold — owes something to James Whistler’s “symphonies” and “arrangements” from more than a decade earlier. But the mirror that reflects the seated woman’s hand and the newspaper it holds is one of Cassatt’s own devices that adds pictorial weight to the gravity with which she already represents concentration in the figure. Seldom do all the elements in her painting come together so forcefully to convey both the theme — reading — and a psychological portrait, which here is of her mother.
Cassatt employs the mirror device in another of her great pictures from the ’70s, “Woman in a Loge,” a painting that’s the very opposite of “Portrait of a Lady” in regard to color. This canvas is all pinks, reds and yellows, with the skin of the sitter positively glowing. Instead of emphasizing her solitude, the mirror behind the woman reflects other viewers in the sweeping balconies of the theater. Everything shimmers in the artificial light of a chandelier; rarely did Cassatt make even her brightest outdoor scenes so brilliant.
Both paintings are, each in its own way, characteristic of long series. “Woman in a Loge” emphasizes the act of women looking — and, in one notable instance, being looked at — in a public setting. “Portrait of a Lady” introduces a depth of feeling that resurfaced after the death of Cassatt’s mother, when the artist began creating her best-known pictures, of women and their children.
Attributing anything to works of art on the basis of biographical incident is touchy. Yet the motif of mother and child clearly was for Cassatt something more than, say, ballet dancers were for Degas. Emotion runs deep in the pictures and is so primal that it’s impossible to think of Cassatt’s mothers and children purely aesthetically, as a theme for sets of variations. The embedded personal aspect probably has to do with the recollection of different sorts of childhood feeling, prompted by the absence of Cassatt’s own mother.
In any event, the children’s responses — from joy to simple exhaustion — are the most completely characterized, suggesting different shades of mood and temperament. By comparison, children painted by other Impressionists are precious and doll-like. Cassatt’s are among the very few who seem alive because she has captured nuances we know to be familiar and human.
It was wholly in her nature that she should seek to transmit such feeling through a new approach to pictorial form. This came to Cassatt through collecting Japanese prints. They, in turn, influenced her conception of space not only in paintings but also in color aquatints that are among the glories of late 19th Century art. The exhibition juxtaposes a selection of her prints with Japanese woodcuts the artist was known to have admired, and there we see innovations that are as splendid as any in her best paintings and pastel drawings.
Still, take all of Cassatt’s achievements together and the world they represent continues to be small. This was the only world open to even an ambitious 19th Century woman, and Cassatt did her best to expand it aesthetically through the painting of loose, flat patterns that were daring in anticipating pure abstraction. Yet ours is an age that refuses to judge art by formal qualities alone; subject matter counts, and no matter how contemporary art historians have attempted to read Cassatt’s, it remains fundamentally restricted to the compass of sitting room, playroom, garden and theater.
Her lost mural for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago depicted an allegorical realm beyond that compass, as did a few related canvases. They show Cassatt the Symbolist, a painter who apparently had known the palette and kind of rendering of Swiss artist Ferdinand Hodler; but there’s too little evidence to know where Cassatt might have taken mural painting, and it’s fruitless to speculate.
The spare design and muted colors of the exhibition installation give her art every advantage, including such rarely seen complementary objects as period fans, opera glasses, nosegay holders, gloves, hats, even a family tea set that appears in one of the grander paintings.
Most of the artworks justify the reputation Cassatt enjoyed in her lifetime, though that is still something different from giving a dimension that transcends time not only by innovation, taste, cosmopolitanism and balance but largeness of experience.
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“Mary Cassatt: Modern Woman” will continue at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Ave., through Jan. 10. A complementary exhibition of Cassatt prints and drawings will open Tuesday at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue; it will continue through Jan. 24.
