Museum Pages: On Mary Cassatt and “Women’s Fiction”
I recently took a train from New York to see a Mary Cassatt exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The exhibit, “Mary Cassatt at Work,” was vast and varied—featuring paintings, drawings, and prints. The subjects of the images were of course, it being Mary Cassatt, almost exclusively women and some children. Women knitting and drawing and reading; women getting fitted for dresses and washing their faces; women bathing and dressing and snuggling their babies. These were not portraits of aristocratic women posed in their finery, painted to glorify their great families or wealthy husbands. These were just… women living their lives. Ordinary women doing ordinary things, represented in art. I was surprised at how deeply this moved me.
I’ve always had a fondness for Cassatt, since I learned about her as a child. Of course I did—she was a woman in a boys’ club, one of very few women artists of the Impressionist movement. But as I went back to the beginning of the exhibit in Philly to walk through the whole thing again, it struck me just how incredibly brazen she was—she was in the boys’ club, sure, but she was not trying even a little bit to be “one of the boys.” She was a woman, unapologetically making art about women’s everyday lives. In the 1800s.
Considering the fact that women who do this are still siloed into patronizing niche categories like “women’s fiction,” Cassatt’s work was downright revolutionary for its insistence that being a woman painting these quotidian, intimate moments of women’s lives didn’t make her any less of a “serious artist” than her friends Claude and Edgar. (Just look at any of the backlash against the recent trend of “divorce memoirs” if you need reminding that women making art about their own lives, or the lives of other women, still get treated like self-indulgent whiners with an agenda, rather than artists.)
Of course, the Impressionist movement as a whole upended artistic traditions with its focus on everyday moments that had not previously been deemed worthy of artistic representation: lunch at the café, a random sidewalk on a rainy day in Paris, dancers warming up for a class. And the great men of Impressionism painted plenty of women—including ordinary, non-aristocratic women doing ordinary everyday things. I love many of these paintings, too.
But still. There’s something different, and important, about Cassatt not trying to prove herself by taking on more “important” subjects, or trying to distance herself from anything feminine. Quite the opposite: She painted picture after picture of women with their babies—not dressed up in the “deserving” context of Madonna and Child, or posing stiffly for official portraits, but in the real daily act of caretaking. A subject that is still relegated to the sidelines of “real art” as the “motherhood memoir,” the “mommy blog.”
Cassatt has been lionized plenty for daring to take the quiet moments of women’s lives seriously as artistic subjects—I’m not breaking new ground there, I know. But it’s one thing to know that she did this, and quite another to stand in a vast gallery full of these images and feel their impact all at once. I’ve always thought of Cassatt’s focus on women as being bold and subversive… for her time. But I was reminded, doing a third loop through the PMA gallery, stopping to stand in front of a few favorite pieces for long stretches, that art about women’s lives is still bold, still subversive. And the very fact that it’s still so often dismissed is exactly why it’s still so necessary to keep making it.
Speaking of art about women… I’ve been having a hell of a time getting to the supposed magic number of 50 reviews for First Love on Amazon (it’s at 39 as of this writing). If you read and liked the book, could you please take a sec to leave a review? (It does not have to be in depth at all—one sentence will do the trick! The algorithm just counts the number of reviews.) Thank you, thank you.
Also: Join me this Thursday for a (free!) virtual craft chat hosted by the
, with Katie Lee Ellison (). Register here.
Added my review (a slighter longer version is on my Substack). The least I can do in appreciation of First Love. The Cassatt exhibit was wonderful, wasn't it? I know from reading First Love that visiting Philly can be an emotionally charged experience, so hopefully the exhibit helped soothe those feelings for you a bit.
I just wrote the 50th review! I need to get to that exhibit.