Mary Cassatt: modern artist, modern woman

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Sept, 1998 by Kevin Sharp, Jane Clarke

WHEN Mary Cassatt executed her massive mural, "Modern Woman" (now lost), for the 1893 Chicago World's Columbian Exposition, she faced the canvas from the vantage point of mid-career. The unusual project well may have given the 48-year-old Cassatt cause to contemplate her own experiences--her rich life as a modern woman.

Born in Allegheny City, Pa., in 1844, Cassatt was the second surviving daughter and fourth of five children. She was raised in a household that greatly valued education and saw travel as a means to encourage learning. Before Cassatt was 10 years old, she already had seen many of the capitals of Europe, including London, Pads, and Berlin. When she later decided to become an artist, her family was concerned. The fact that she had chosen to seek a profession of any kind would have been startling to any well-to-do parents of a daughter in the early 1860s. Moreover, her decision to become an artist may have seemed impractical, given that painting was largely the province of men during the 19th century.

Overcoming the reservations of her family, Cassatt pursued a career in the arts, studying first in Philadelphia at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts before eventually persuading her parents that Pads was essential to her artistic development. They reluctantly conceded and, from 1865 until 1871, despite the limited access women had to conventional art training in Paris, Cassatt managed to study with such important and then-popular masters as Jean-Leon Gerome, Thomas Couture, and Charles Chaplin. Indeed, Cassatt enjoyed some success in these early years. The Salon--Pads' official exhibition of art--accepted a painting by her in 1868, and another work, now believed lost, was included in the 1870 show.

Cassatt found her ambitions overtaken by historical events in 1871 and returned to the U.S. to escape the Franco-Prussian War. Less than a year later, disgusted with the lack of significant paintings in her homeland, Cassatt determined that Europe was the only place where serious art could be found and appreciated, and where her lofty ambitions would be satisfied.

By the end of 1872, Cassatt was back in Europe, working in the Italian city of Parma, where she copied the frescoes of Antonio Correggio and continued to produce original works of art for the Pads Salon. In late 1873, she traveled to Madrid and Seville in Spain, seeking the Old Master examples her homeland lacked. Impressed by the work of Diego Velazquez and Bartolome Murillo, Cassatt executed paintings from this period largely of Spanish subjects, with bullfighters and lovely young women draped in lace mantillas dominating her canvases. The colorful exoticism of these works proved at least somewhat appealing to Parisian audiences, and her masterful "Offering the Panal to the Bullfighter" was accepted for the 1873 Salon.

Cassatt's travels--first to a recently unified Italy and then to a Spain racked by local revolutions--had enhanced her modem education and helped realize her first professional successes. Nevertheless, by 1874, nearing the age of 30, the artist realized it was time to settle in one place and build a career. Once established in Paris, she continued to paint in the fairly conventional academic style she had learned in the late 1860s and refined in Italy and Spain, flavoring her canvases with the romanticism of exotic costumes and the suggestion of distant lands. Then, while walking the Boulevard Haussmann, Cassatt saw a bold pastel painting of ballet dancers in the window of a gallery. It was by the master of impressionism, Edgar Degas, and, as Cassatt later would describe the discovery: "I saw art as I wanted to see it. I began to live."

Cassatt eventually met Degas, and through him joined the Impressionists. In 1879, for her debut in the group's fourth show, Cassatt submitted a series of paintings and pastels representing young women similarly making their own first appearances at the opera. Such stunningly modem works as "Woman in a Loge" and "At the Theater" instantly aligned Cassatt with Degas' branch of impressionism, but carved out a thematic territory all her own as well. While Degas investigated the performers on stage, Cassatt slyly revealed the often equally compelling performance taking place in the audience.

By the time of her first appearance with the Impressionists, Cassatt had been joined in Paris by her parents and her older sister, Lydia. The family settled in Paris in part to lend respectability to their daughter's existence-no proper American woman would live alone in Paris--and to seek the most advanced medical opinions for the chronically ill Lydia. This reconstituted Cassatt household became a subject too appealing for the artist not to record. She painted her mother reading the Parisian newspaper, Le Figaro, in "Portrait of a Lady" and Lydia perusing a journal in "Woman Reading."

Lydia was diagnosed with Bright's disease, an incurable kidney ailment, from which she would die in 1882. During the last two years of her life, Lydia became her sister's favorite model. Works such as "The Garden" and "Autumn" are a testament to the closeness of the sisterly bond, but they also chart the moments and movements of a modem woman in the 19th century. Lydia's death would affect Cassatt for years to come.