Ugly babies.
As a father, I know that I can’t be objective on the matter, and I’ve never brought it up with the parents of a homely child, but we can agree that, acknowledged as such or not, ugly babies exist. They are out there.
Mary Cassatt painted some.
Let’s be fair—as the new show, Mary Cassatt at Work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art1 amply demonstrates, Mary Cassatt put in the hours and moved units, so there are examples of every permutation. Beautiful paintings of adorable cherubs; dashing paintings of ugly urchins; hack paintings of rosy-cheeked Gerbers; and ghastly misfires inspired by troll-faced little gremlins. Mind you, Cassatt painted a lot of other subjects, and you won’t find any ugly paintings on the walls at Philadelphia, but as an active hunter of Cassatts at large, I have seen some stinkers.
Some blame must be laid on the painter. It is proof of her fearlessness that not every Cassatt is a great one. She experimented constantly in search of new compositions, techniques, and media, never resting on a Greatest Hit. You can’t find a bad Motherwell—there’s a man who found his one note and sang it true to the end—but you can find a bad Cassatt. She took risks.
The rest of the blame, of course, must be laid on the Patriarchy. (It wouldn’t be fair to lay it on the children; they have a hard enough track to run, being so dog-faced right out of the gates.) In three years of writing Hanging Papers2 I haven’t had a good excuse to write about Cassatt, but she is in my view one of the greatest painters ever to lift a brush. Over the decades, I’ve looked at a few ugly babies that I was trying to sell—torture me and I’ll never divulge which, but you can probably make your own list—and each time a pathetic little pug stared at me, I wondered to myself, “How in the hell am I going to sell this?!?”
And that puts in a nutshell one of the reasons I love Cassatt as a painter: she could have painted racehorses and centaurs and flamingos3 and bowls of fruit. No one ever saw a Degas of a steeplechase and wondered if the horse was too ugly to market; no one ever looked at an Ensor of a laughing skull and thought ‘there’s an unsaleable canvas’; no one ever sent back a Soutine of rotting fish.4 But she painted ordinary women doing ordinary things—wealthy, opera-going women, but not goddesses, actresses, or supernatural seductresses. And those opera-ready ordinaries do ordinary things, like drink tea, drive cars, and bounce babies. Even the ugly ones need bouncing.
Which is a daring thing to do when you could do anything, and also a very sophisticated thing to do amidst the Impressionists, her mentor Edgar Degas chief among them. Cassatt was a Pennsylvania native—one of the reasons PMA has strong holdings—but her effort at life as a Parisian expat was interrupted by the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. When she got back to France, she developed a technique that won her the embrace of the nascent group of painters we know today as the Impressionists, and an invitation to exhibit with them from Degas. Degas would “not admit that a woman can draw like that,”5 and he became to Cassatt “the only man I know whose judgment would be a help to me”—a delightful odd couple that experimented and collaborated from that point forward.
The PMA show leaves Degas in the wings and spotlights the ways in which Cassatt’s work is about, well, work. At a glance, many paintings of women in hip outfits read as of a piece with the Impressionist leisure life—taffeta, blue and white teacups, spats, lawns. But the PMA recenters Cassatt’s work within the understanding that a lot of what looks like leisure is actually unpaid labor—setting up the tea-party, or tending bar at the Follies,6 or doing the emotional work of listening to Degas go on about whatever he was going on about7—or doing that most ancient line of unpaid work: mothering.
Impressionism wasn’t a manifesto-issuing, molotov-tossing movement, but the preoccupation with a new, modern sort of “realism” was an abiding interest, whether the subject was a haystack or a lily-pad or a lady driving a buggy. The centering of work within the show is an illuminating angle, but a sidebar that holds my imagination is that Cassatt’s interest in women with children was a perfect vehicle for the formal interest of Impressionism. Babies look weird; they don’t hold still. They are harder to paint than the vanishing sunset on a Rouen cathedral, and Western art has struggled to represent them, through failure or indifference, since oil paint was invented. Childhood is not new, but painting children this way was as brand-new to Paris as the Eiffel Tower. And it doesn’t seem a coincidence that the same suite of tools that powered Degas’s cantering horses and swooning ballerinas was not just available but perhaps necessary to get these wriggling little humans down on the canvas. Maybe I’m acutely aware of this after rocking a toddler to sleep for the past ninety minutes, but when I look at Cassatt’s mothers, I don’t see leisure. For the mother and the painter, I see work.
Even the cute ones.
Thanks for reading.
Jonathan
jonathan@jonathanmillerspies.com
Mary Cassatt at Work, Philadelphia Museum of Art, through September 8.
Happy third birthday to us a few weeks ago, June 1! You can start reading from the top right here.
If Degas’s Young Woman with Ibis is not yet familiar, may I encourage you to stumble upon it without viewing it first. A singular delight.
That’s not historically true: Soutine didn’t win easy and universal acclaim, but the elan with which his “brilliant, bloody flesh” is celebrated today would be hard to pour onto Cassatt. See Lance Esplund’s review of the 2018 Jewish Museum show, “‘Chaim Soutine: Flesh’ Review: Bloody, Brilliant Still Lifes,” The Wall Street Journal, May 2, 2018, here.
I’m not sure which work he was specifially referring to, but the Met thinks it’s Woman Bathing (La Toilette).
Édouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère.