Mary Cassatt, Philadelphia Museum of Art review — from poet of the pampered to economic agitator

Mary Cassatt has long been pigeonholed as a painter of podgy children being bathed, snuggled and fussed over by single-minded mothers. The critical consensus about her holds that tenderness spills into treacle and her depictions of domestic bliss verge on the cloying. Here to blow away that reductive characterisation is Mary Cassatt at Work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. This polemical exhibition makes the case that, far from sentimentalising motherhood, the artist was actually reporting on women in the workforce: the poet of pampered housewives was a hard-nosed analyst of economic power relationships.

The show’s curators, Jennifer Thompson and Laurel Garber, note that the adult models who posed for Cassatt had often never seen the rented cherub they were paid to grip for the duration of a session — and the struggle shows. “She subtly staged childcare as active and laborious,” a text panel points out. For once, though, the conventional wisdom is correct; it’s the revisionist view that needs revising. She painted an awful lot of well-cuddled babies, reaching the apogee of mawkishness with “Woman and Child” (1908), a serenade of sweet smiles and apple-red cheeks.

The show is uneven because Cassatt was uneven. Some of her most virtuosic pictures seem genuinely radical even today, while others succumb to kitsch. Thompson and Garber have wisely installed them all thematically rather than by date, which makes the late-career fall-off feel less dramatic and depressing. And there are masterpieces, like the brilliant “Little Girl in a Blue Armchair” (1878), which features a cropped slice of a Parisian apartment and a tiny child awkwardly slumped in an overstuffed armchair, a little dog mirroring her repose.

Cassatt approaches the bored child from below, angling the space so that it recedes in an abrupt diagonal, a narrow opening that threads its way between mountainous furniture like a river through a gorge. The viewer is invited into the girl’s world — and into her ennui. Unfortunately, research has placed an asterisk by that achievement: it was Degas who altered the height of a wall and, with it, the balance of the composition, to sharpen the psychological insight.

Another painting from the same year offers Cassatt at her solo best. The woman in black at the opera from “In the Loge” leans forward in her box, scanning the crowd with binoculars that obscure her face. Rather than preen distractedly, as social mores would dictate, she scrutinises society, shielded by temporary anonymity. The woman presents herself not as object but as objectifier, framing her subjects as an artist does, with intense detachment. But the male gaze reasserts itself, or tries to: past the dark silhouette of her body, in the brightly lit background, you can just make out a man on a facing balcony, with his own opera glasses fixed on her.

The show (and its title) justly emphasises Cassatt’s professional independence. Born into an upper-middle-class Pennsylvania family in 1844, she was supposed to follow her peers into matrimony. But that was not her plan. Instead, she spent the civil-war years training at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts with an eye to going pro.

Dissatisfied with traditional instruction, she headed for Paris as soon as she could. Her father refused financial assistance; if she was going to set herself up in a studio, he insisted, it would have to pay for itself. His disapproval proved to be a boon, because it freed her to chart her own course. In 1877, she began a 40-year friendship with Degas, who invited her to exhibit with the Impressionists.

“I accepted with joy,” she wrote. “Finally, I could work with an absolute independence . . . I already knew who my true masters were. I admired Manet, Courbet and Degas. I hated conventional art. I began to live.”

The conventions she fled did not let her slip away so easily. While the men in her circle fanned out to report on the new, modern Paris of café-concerts, horse races and grands boulevards, she mostly confined herself to house and garden. Women of her class did not go out without a chaperone and if she wanted to paint the women alone, she had to be where they were: home. Her most successful paintings capture the interiority and sequestration of upper-middle-class women’s lives. Her subjects read books, newspapers and magazines. They stare out of windows.

Especially in Cassatt’s prints, women remain physically close but psychically remote, letting their minds rove where their bodies cannot. Her sister Lydia and their mother regularly crossed the Atlantic to stay with Mary in Paris, and she sketched them together in a subtle 1882 etching. Mother and daughter sit diagonally across from one another, gazing silently in different directions, while the artist’s attention is fixed on the teatime gear: a tray laden with teapot, creamer and sugar bowl. The specific gleam of the still life contrasts with the elusiveness of the women’s secret thoughts. The two Cassatts remain distant — from each other, from us — savouring the freedom in their minds.

The most alluring works in the show explore the hum of the unsaid and the unexplained. A haunting print depicts a woman by a window, wrapped in a shawl and balancing a ribboned hat on the crown of her head. We notice her hands fuss with something in her lap, but her face is shadowed and shorn of expression, its flecked surface dissolving into atmosphere. Who is this half-illuminated woman and what is her story? Has she returned home after an upsetting encounter, or is she contemplating an excursion, checked by anxiety? The mood hovers between tension and reverie.

Cassatt had company in her study of the contemplative life of women. Vilhelm Hammershøi conjured lyric poetry out of nearly empty rooms where women with obscured faces find contentment in solitude. Édouard Vuillard also kept his mother and sister under close observation, weaving their home lives into intoxicating medleys of pattern and colour. In parallel with those male artists, Cassatt packed unexpressed emotion into tight spaces, generating an electric vibe.

That achievement is not enough for the curators, though; they try to present her as a social warrior and hammer home the fact that she hired professional models as fictional mothers. There is a strong argument hovering in the background here, but it’s misdirected. The catalogue includes a passing reference to Berthe Morisot’s 1879 painting of “The Wet Nurse” feeding an infant — not her own — outdoors. That work is not in the show, and the catalogue does not mention the art historian Linda Nochlin’s 1988 essay about it, subtitled “The Construction of Work and Leisure in Impressionist Painting”.

Nochlin explored the transactional relationship in what looks superficially like a modern Madonna and child. The two figures in the Morisot represent different social classes, and the adult is hiring out a bodily function to clients in the haute bourgeoisie. Thompson and Garber apply a similar kind of economic analysis to Cassatt, but this time it doesn’t stick. Working women were everywhere in Impressionist painting: waitresses, entertainers, barmaids, laundresses, milliners, seamstresses. In Cassatt, though, they crop up in the guise of full-time moms, cooing and chortling over their dewy progeny. What we have here isn’t a revolution; it’s a retreat to timeless custom and the comfort of a privileged class. You can’t just wish that away.

To September 8, philamuseum.org