In 2015, London’s National Gallery mounted the exhibition ‘Inventing Impressionism: The Man Who Sold a Thousand Monets’. I was deeply irritated by it. It is half a century since women art historians challenged the myth of a women-free art history and made visible both the women and the men who co-created not only Impressionism but modern art as a whole. Yet, the National Gallery was pedalling the tired and discredited tale of a heroic ‘band of brothers’ in modern art: a phrasing that was actually used for the publicity of the BBC series in 2006 called ‘The Impressionists’ when an elderly Claude Monet (Julian Glover) reminisced over the lives and loves of his pals Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.
That said, despite its failings, an exhibition about the role of a dealer was welcome because it reminded us of modern art’s speculative financial infrastructure and its creation of a new hero – the art market itself. The dealer in question was Paul Durand-Ruel (1831–1922), who did the most to foster the market for many of the 30 or so Paris-based artists who first exhibited together in 1874 and have since become selectively known as the Impressionists. Durand-Ruel paid some of these artists enough to live on while he stimulated sales for the works by staging strategic exhibitions, working closely with the auction house Hôtel Drouot, publishing a short-lived journal, Revue internationale de l’art et de la curiosité and commissioning writing by sympathetic critics. By marginalizing the women who were equal members of the group ‘Inventing Impressionism’ nonetheless produced a skewed picture of the movement Durand-Ruel financially supported.
One of the founding members, Berthe Morisot, was represented in the show with just two paintings out of a total of 85 works on view. More egregiously, and why I was so incensed, the work of Mary Cassatt – the only American in the group and one of its most active and intellectually, committed members – appeared only once. As if she had not been not part of the original exhibition society in Paris in the 1870s and ’80s, the single work by her in the exhibition – her later painting, The Child’s Bath (1893) – could only be found in one of the rooms that documented Durand-Ruel’s activities in New York during the 1890s. Not only was this rank bad history: Cassatt and Morisot were artistically and financially central to most of the eight exhibitions this group of artists staged in Paris between 1874 and 1886. It once again prevented British visitors from encountering Cassatt’s paintings of which there are only two small works in public collections in the UK (the Burrell Collection, Glasgow, and City Art Gallery, Birmingham). No encounter means no interest and hence no pressure to publish books for interested people to buy, hence no expanding knowledge of the artist. It is a vicious circle.
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Mary Cassatt, Little Girl in a Blue Armchair, 1878, oil on canvas, 90 x 130 cm. Courtesy: National Gallery of Art, Washington, and Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris
‘Inventing Impressionism’ thus suppressed a crucial historical aspect of the group Durand-Ruel supported and who supported him: it was one of the first egalitarian art movements in the history of art. Jointly organized by both the men and women, these artists proclaimed their modernity by asserting independence from the official regulation of art via private entrepreneurship.
The artists we now call the Impressionists did not name themselves thus and were not a coherent movement. Preferring to be considered ‘Independents’, they shared no stylistic homogeneity even with the organizing group, which itself changed over the 12 years. (Monet and Renoir and defected in the early 1880s.) What makes them significant is that, on 15 April 1874, they launched themselves the Société Anonyme des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs, etc (The Society of Painters, Sculptors, Engravers, etc) in the photographer Nadar’s studio on the newly built and fashionable Boulevard des Capucines. In one dismissive review, targeting Impression, soleil levant (Impression, Sunrise, 1872) – a harbour painting by Monet – the critic Louis Leroy sarcastically coined the term ‘Impressionist’ in the newspaper Le Charivari. Art history has chosen to follow suit. This is despite the fact that the group, under Degas’s influence – after disbanding the Société Anonyme for their exhibition in 1876 – called themselves ‘Intransigents’ and ‘Independents’ as often as ‘Impressionists’ and exhibited in 1879 as ‘un groupe des artistes indépendants, réalistes et impressionistes’ (a group of independent, realist and impressionist artists). The first major text on their work by Edmond Duranty, published for their second show in 1876, was a 35-page pamphlet simply titled La Nouvelle Peinture / The New Painting: Concerning the Group of Painters exhibiting at Durand-Ruel’s Galleries. Private enterprise could create both a showcase and a market for the group’s art that was attempting to engage with the challenges of representing contemporary modernity. These challenges meant not only new topics – notably aspects of urban class and gender experience – but also new artistic procedures for grasping the more intangible aspects of modernity’s social relations, so critically based on the economy of monetary exchange. This may explain why the figure of the brothel-based prostitute (seller of flesh) and even those women suspected of offering sexual services in cafés and bars became one of the symptomatic topics for representing this new logic of modern social relations.
So effective and far-reaching, however, has been the exclusionary sexism of 20th century that, for example, when in 1998 it was proposed to bring to Paris ‘Mary Cassatt: Modern Woman’ – the exhibition curated for the Art Institute of Chicago and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston – apparently the dismissive response from French museum curators was Marie qui? (Mary who?). This year, however, a spectacularly intelligently curated show of 50 major works by Mary Cassatt from the 1870s to the 1910s was finally staged in Paris at the Musée Jacquemart-André, an extraordinary home-turned-private museum that was named after the artist Nélie Jacquemart (1841-1912) and the collector Édouard André (1833-94). Curated by the American Cassatt scholar, Nancy Mowll Mathews, and Pierre Curie of the Musée Jacquemart-André, the show was accompanied by a catalogue, Mary Cassatt: An American Impressionist in Paris, and a new biography by Isabelle Enaud-Lechien, Mary Cassatt: une Américaine chez les impressionists (An American at Home with the Impressionists). It’s the first French biography since 1913, when Achille Segard’s Mary Cassatt: Un peintre des enfants et des mères (A painter of Children and Mothers) was published – a profound Symbolist reading of the artist’s later work. Yet, both these new books overemphasize Cassatt as ‘an American’, despite the fact that she lived in France for more than 60 years. With one eye on US visitors, no doubt, the risk is that identifying her by nationality as opposed to artistic affinity once again exiles Cassatt from the art historical place she actually occupied.
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Mary Cassatt, At the Theater, c.1879, pastel on paper, 55 x 46 cm. Courtesy: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City
After her many years studying and painting in France, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands, Cassatt (who was born in 1844), had returned to Paris in 1873 where she exhibited at the Salon for four years. In 1877 – the only year the Salon rejected her – Degas invited her to join the group of Independents for their third exhibition in 1879. Degas recognized that Cassatt’s radicalism, like his, rested on the strong foundations of the study of composition and colour in the Old Masters. For Cassatt, this included Antonio da Correggio, Frans Hals, Parmigianino, Peter Paul Rubens and Diego Velásquez and, for Degas, Jean-August Dominique Ingres and the Italians; they both admired Johannes Vermeer and shared an equally astute grasp of the radical implications of the work of Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet. In the 1870s and ’80s, Manet clearly looked closely at Cassatt’s paintings of the theatre, notably her exploration of reflections in mirrors and the effects of artificial lighting in these arenas of modern entertainment. This is evident his last major work, Un bar aux Folies-Bergère (A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, 1882), where Manet wittily places a quotation from her painting At the Français – A Sketch (now titled In the Loge,1878) in homage to her. Cassatt and Degas remained intellectual and artistic colleagues throughout their lives, although his rabid anti-Semitism sorely tested their friendship during the Dreyfus Affair that radically divided French society from 1894 until 1906. In 1915, however, their work was exhibited side by side in New York in an exhibition curated by the collector Louisine Havemeyer in support of the suffrage cause – Cassatt was a staunch suffragist. Havemeyer’s knowledge of Degas had been fostered by Cassatt. As early as 1877 the artist persuaded the-then 16-year-old student, Louisine Elder, to buy as her first purchase a pastel of a ballet rehearsal by the struggling Degas.
Over many years of teaching many American collectors to appreciate ‘the new painting’, Cassatt materially assisted her financially imperilled colleagues by introducing these buyers to their work. She advised Havemeyer and her husband on the creation of a collection that is now the core of the amazing holdings of modern French painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It was through her careful cultivation of new collectors that Cassatt was able to save Durand-Ruel when, in desperation following the financial crash in France in the 1880s, he risked all on opening a gallery in New York – something he couldn’t have done without Cassatt’s financial assistance and with her address book of forward-thinking buyers. Cassatt’s intellect and power made her a major force in diffusing the stand-off between North American and French art communities.
The gender inclusivity of the Société Anonyme meant more than just including women artists. There were already lots of them exhibiting at the official Salon. In 1848, 15 percent of exhibitors were women; after 1877 this rose to over 20 percent achieving 30 percent by 1899. Gender inclusivity was also performed in what they painted. Let me explain. As a cultural category, Modernity is the cultural reflection of modernization – the massive socio-economic transformation impelled by industrialization and urbanization. Economic restructuring had political and social effects involving not only the creation of new classes – bourgeois and proletarian – with their political and economic antagonism; culture, too, was affected by the new social forms of living. The art we still mis-name as Impressionism is better understood as the artistic negotiation of Modernity as both a lived experience in, and a social consciousness of, changing forms of life whose meanings and effects were not immediately visible.
The ‘new painting’ tentatively mapped the spaces of experience where Modernity might be ‘captured’. This clearly involved the city and its forms of entertainment (cafés, theatres) and leisure (the races, promenades in the park, the seaside, weekend trips to the suburbs and beyond), its sites of erotic pleasure and sexual exchange (brothels, backstage, boudoirs of the courtesans). It also included new forms of intimacy and family life. It is here that the historical and historic gender inclusivity of these artists becomes critically important. If we overlook artists such as Cassatt and Morisot, Marie Braquemond and Eva Gonzales – as did canonizing 20th-century accounts of modern art – we miss the subtle relays so significant to the artists and their collectors between public and private, class and gender, sexuality and other equally important forms of sociality and networks of relationships.
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Mary Cassatt, 1913, black and white photograph. Verso reads: ‘The only photograph for which she ever posed. Courtesy of Durand-Ruel.’ Courtesy: The Frick Collection, New York
For the artist-men of this group – such as the haute-bourgeois Manet and Degas – the spaces of urban modernity were the playgrounds of the privileged white men of the Jockey Club: theatre, opera, the courtesan’s boudoir and maisons closes. (Literally, ‘closed houses’: France permitted prostitution in officially regulated brothels in which women were confined. There was much concern about ‘free’, casual prostitution where the women were not subject to health checks). For the less socially advantaged, such as Monet or Renoir, their families and homes were the scenes of paternal images of domestic intimacy, leisure, sociality and working life. This was also true of Cassatt and Morisot, who did not and could not visit brothels or hang out back stage at the opera and theatre to pick up under-age dancers. In the 1870s, Cassatt, however, painted the public arena of the theatre (massively popular in Paris) as the stage of social performance by the audience, as well as a location of women’s intellectual engagement with modern drama and tragedy, often performed by Sarah Bernhardt. In the 1880s, she began to paint the social rituals of a monied American bourgeoisie that were also themes of the novels of Henry James and especially, with a feminist gloss, Edith Wharton. After the 1890s, in place of the formerly religious and mythical inflection of the human experience of the passage of time, (birth, childhood, old age) Cassatt made visible both the physical and psychological work involved in caring for a child as well as the artistic work that underpinned her paintings’ forms, coloration and surface through which her study of this aspect of modernity would be proclaimed.
I stress work. Cassatt formally studied the gestures of the labour peculiar to these spaces: be it the creative work of the bourgeoisie, such as embroidery or tapestry, or that of nursemaids bathing, comforting, playing with, and teaching, children. As an artist always preoccupied by the compositional challenge of bodies in space, Cassatt was also fascinated by generational difference. This meant the close study of the peculiarities of the unformed, fleshy child body versus the socially formed gestures and learned postures adult women of different classes.
Cassatt’s formal study of child/adult interactions belongs, therefore, to the later 19th-century cultural moment when the child and the adolescent appeared as objects of both psychological inquiry and literary exploration. Think of the writings of Sigmund Freud and Marcel Proust and, later, Colette. We do Cassatt’s paintings a deep injustice by collapsing them into the premodern iconography of ‘mother and child’. Recognizing her novel and intensely formal explorations of the emerging subjectivity of the child and her/his socialization in relationship to adults, we can also discern appreciate the symbolist interest in psycho-social complexities shared with modernist writers and thinkers.
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Mary Cassatt, The Child’s Bath, 1893, oil on canvas, 100 x 66 cm. Courtesy: The Art Institute of Chicago and Google Arts Project
Intending to provide a serious representation of Cassatt’s long and creative career within eight small rooms, the exhibition at the Musée Jacquemart-André made its case despite the compression imposed by space and cost. Each room set up a clear argument by means of subtle and well-chosen conversations across media (pastel, etching and oil paint), scale and topic. During my visit, I studied the astute combinations that created conversations between the works in each room as much as I observed each work closely for their stunning compositional details. Like Degas, who also worked across line and colour, Cassatt’s formal intelligence is revealed in the skill she applied to the unforgiving precision of drypoint etching, while her brilliant use of colour emerges across the gestural energies of pastel and painterly application. At times, there are slashing brushstrokes boldly establishing form and space while, in other passages, finely modulated colour realizes the delicate skin tints and points up differences between the soft fleshiness of a child’s body and the worked hands or matured faces of adults. She often daringly left areas unfinished as if to insist, in her modernist fashion, that her own new processes of picture-making could effectively convey the unfinished person that is a growing child.
The first room established Cassatt’s entry into the independent group with Little Girl in a Blue Armchair (1878), a work which, according to a letter by Cassatt, had been altered very slightly on Degas’s advice. Infra-red imaging of the painting for the exhibition ‘Degas / Cassatt’ in 2014 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, indicates that Degas’s hand may have manipulated the space in deep background. By changing the straight line of floor-wall junction to an oblique angle, he dynamized the recession into space. Far from representing tutelage, it signifies both artists’ shared investigations into the formal play with non-standard pictorial space and their techniques for radicalizing it. The main feature of this painting is a lolling, disgruntled overdressed little girl – whose posture and facial expression form a telling counterpoint to the pretty elegance of Renoir’s contemporaneous portrait Madame Georges Charpentier and her Children Georgette-Berthe and Paul-Emilie Charles (1878). Alongside this work were many paintings I had never seen. These included the intricate compositional dynamics of The Stocking (1889-90) from the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon; the startlingly vivid portrait of a pert toddler, Little Girl in Her Chemise on a Bed (1890-93) from the Fondation Lugt in Paris; and an extraordinary 1911 pastel of a fearsomely earnest girl in an outsized blue hat from a private collection.
After visiting the Cassatt exhibition, I walked through the Jacquemart-André’s Italian rooms; they formed the perfect art historical framework for this show of a richly educated artist. With her deep knowledge of the history of art, Cassatt fearlessly took on the challenge of creating a new kind of painting. She played a vital intellectual, artistic and organizational role in the project of modernity yet – until now – has been radically misrepresented by a regressive 20th-century sexism that failed to acknowledge the egalitarian revolution of the group to which she belonged. Over one hundred years ago, artistic modernity – women participating equally – was in advance of political modernity – women acknowledged as citizens – by at least half a century. It’s time art history caught up.
Published in Frieze Masters, issue 7, 2018, with the title ‘A Society of Painters’.
Main image: Mary Cassatt, Young Women Picking Fruit (detail), 1892. Courtesy: Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Patrons Art Fund and Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris
Griselda Pollock is the author of Mary Cassatt: Painter of Modern Women (Thames and Hudson, 1998) and Mary Cassatt (Chaucer Library of Art, 1978/2005).
First published in Issue 7
Mary Cassatt，蓝色扶手椅中的小女孩，1878，帆布上的油，90x 130 cm。礼仪：美国国家美术馆，华盛顿，巴黎，雅克马特-安德烈博物馆，杜兰德-鲁尔支持并支持杜兰德-鲁尔这个团体，因此“印象主义发明”压抑了杜兰德-鲁尔这个团体的关键历史方面：它是历史上第一批平等主义艺术运动之一。F艺术。这些艺术家由男性和女性共同组织，通过主张独立于通过私营企业对艺术的官方管制，宣告了他们的现代性。我们现在称之为印象派艺术家的艺术家因此没有命名自己，也不是一个连贯的运动。他们更倾向于被认为是“独立人士”，即使与组织团体（组织团体本身在12年间发生了变化）在文体上也没有任何相同之处。（莫奈和雷诺阿在19世纪80年代早期叛逃）他们之所以引人注目，是因为1874年4月15日，他们在纳达尔的摄影师工作室里创办了“无名氏艺术家协会”(SociétéAnonyme des Artistes Peintres)、雕塑家、雕刻家协会等。新建和时尚的斯堪的纳维亚大道。在一篇针对《印象》的轻蔑评论中，评论家路易斯·莱罗伊讽刺性地在《查理瓦里》报上创造了“印象派”一词。艺术史选择了随心所欲。尽管如此，在德加的影响下，这个团体在1876年解散了SociétéAnonyme参加他们的展览后，自称为“英才”和“独立者”，经常被称为“印象派艺术家”，并在1879年作为“印第安艺术家联合组织”展出。Ts，Realalistes和印象派（一组独立、现实主义和印象派艺术家）。埃德蒙·杜兰蒂（Edmond Duranty）为他们1876年的第二场展览出版的第一本主要作品是一本35页的小册子，标题很简单，叫做《新锐皮托管》/《新绘画：关于在杜兰德·鲁尔画廊展出的画家群体》。私营企业可以为该集团的艺术创造展示和市场，该集团正试图应对代表当代现代性的挑战。这些挑战不仅意味着新的课题——特别是城市阶级和性别体验的方面——而且意味着新的艺术程序，以掌握现代社会关系中更无形的方面，因此批判性地以货币交换经济为基础。这也许可以解释为什么妓女（卖肉的）和甚至那些被怀疑在咖啡馆和酒吧提供性服务的妇女的形象成为表现现代社会关系的新逻辑的症状性话题之一。然而，20世纪的排他性歧视是如此的有效和深远，以至于，例如，1998年，有人提议将“玛丽·卡斯特：现代女性”——芝加哥艺术学院和波士顿美术馆举办的展览——带到巴黎，显然是法国博物馆馆长不屑一顾的回应是玛丽奎？（玛丽是谁？）然而，今年，玛丽·卡斯特从18世纪70年代到19世纪20年代的50件主要作品的精彩策划展在巴黎雅克玛-安德烈博物馆(Musée Jacquemart-André)上演，这是一座以艺术家奈莉·雅克玛(1841-1912)和t.他是收藏家。由美国学者卡萨特、Nancy Mowll Mathews和皮埃尔·居里的《杰克梅特安德鲁》改编，该剧附有一个目录，玛丽·卡萨特：巴黎的一位美国印象派画家和Isabelle Enaud Lechien的一部新传记：玛丽·卡萨特。伊斯兰教主义者（家里有印象派画家）。这是自1913年阿基尔·塞加德的《玛丽·卡萨特：孩子们和母亲的画家》出版以来的第一部法国传记，这是一部对艺术家后期作品的深刻象征主义解读。然而，这两本新书都过分强调了卡斯特是“美国人”，尽管她在法国生活了60多年。毫无疑问，如果把目光放在美国游客身上，风险在于，以国籍而不是艺术亲和力来识别她，将卡斯特从她实际占据的艺术历史场所再次驱逐出去。f77-33_cassatt-att.r_recto_cmyk.jpg Mary Cassatt，剧院，约1879，纸上粉彩，55x 46 cm。礼仪：堪萨斯城纳尔逊-阿特金斯美术馆。在法国、西班牙、意大利和荷兰学习绘画多年后，卡萨特（1844年出生）于1873年回到巴黎，在那里她在沙龙展出了四年。1877年，也就是沙龙拒绝她的唯一一年，德加邀请她加入独立人士小组，参加1879年的第三次展览。德加认识到，卡萨特的激进主义和他一样，建立在《老大师》中对构图和色彩研究的坚实基础之上。对于卡斯特来说，这包括安东尼奥·达·科雷吉奥、弗兰斯·哈尔斯、帕米贾尼诺、彼得·保罗·鲁本斯和迭戈·维拉斯奎兹，对于德加、让·奥古斯特·多米尼克·英格雷斯和意大利人；他们都钦佩约翰内斯·弗米尔，并且同样敏锐地领会了古斯塔夫·C作品的激进含义。我们在一起。19世纪70年代和80年代，马奈清楚地仔细观察了卡斯特的戏剧画，尤其是她对镜子中反射的探索以及现代娱乐场所中人工照明的效果。这很明显是他的最后一部重要作品，Un bar aux Folies-Bergre(Folies-Bergre，1882年，Folies-Bergre的酒吧)，其中Manet巧妙地引用了她在Frana is的画作——一幅素描(现名为《日志》，1878)来向她表示敬意。卡萨特和德加在他们的一生中都保持着智慧和艺术的同事，尽管他狂热的反犹太主义在1894年到1906年间彻底分裂法国社会的德雷福斯事件中严重考验了他们的友谊。然而，1915年，他们的作品在纽约由收藏家路易斯·哈维迈尔策划的展览中并排展出，以支持选举权事业——卡斯特是一个坚定的选举权主义者。哈夫迈耶对德加的知识是由卡萨特培养的。早在1877年，这位艺术家就说服当时16岁的学生路易斯·埃尔德，在她第一次购买芭蕾舞彩排粉彩画时，她遇到了挣扎中的德加。多年来，卡萨特教授许多美国收藏家欣赏“这幅新画”，通过向这些买家介绍他们的作品，在物质上帮助了陷入财政困境的同事。她建议哈维迈耶和她的丈夫创作一个收藏品，这个收藏品现在是纽约大都会艺术博物馆中令人惊叹的现代法国绘画藏品的核心。正是通过精心培养新的收藏家，卡萨特才得以挽救杜兰德-鲁尔。19世纪80年代法国发生金融危机后，他绝望地冒险在纽约开办一家画廊——这是他离不开的。FRIZE特稿 ARThing编译