PHILADELPHIA — “Mary Cassatt at Work” is a large and mostly satisfying exhibition devoted to the career of the great American artist beloved for her sensitive and often sentimental views of family life. The “at work” in the title of the Philadelphia Museum of Art show references the curators’ interest in Cassatt’s pioneering effort to establish herself as a professional artist within a male-dominated field.
Throughout the show, which includes some 130 paintings, pastels, prints and drawings, the wall text and the art on view stresses Cassatt’s fixation on art as a career rather than a pastime. She used images of women at work — nurturing children and doing handiwork such as knitting and embroidery to fill their spare time — to define a sphere of feminine labor independent from the one in which Cassatt actually operated, the salons, galleries and exhibitions through which the impressionists changed the course of art history.
“By talking and writing so frequently about her work, she gave it definition and highlighted its importance as a source of income, independence, contentment, professional stature, and pride,” writes Jennifer A. Thompson, who co-curated the exhibition with Laurel Garber.
Visitors will probably find the art itself more interesting than the focus on labor, which becomes diffuse by the end of the exhibition. The Philadelphia Museum of Art owns 84 works by Cassatt, including some spectacular paintings and pastels that show the artist at her most daring and experimental. Included are sunny views of bourgeois life, such as the 1896 “Maternal Caress”; problematic and awkward works like the 1881 image of a woman, child and male servant in “Driving”; and the magnificent play of reflection in the 1879 “Woman in a Loge.”
These are complemented by major works from public and private collections, including the National Gallery’s “Little Girl in a Blue Armchair,” which closes the exhibition with a deceptively placid vision of a female child and a little dog, suggesting an ominous life for the girl as a thing to be owned and domesticated.
That painting, and many others, suggests that work and autonomy are important prisms through which to understand Cassatt’s art. But a more rigorously intersectional approach would help — that is, a focus not just on feminist narratives but also on narratives of privilege. Cassatt was rich, and art made her richer. She was determined to make her way in a male-dominated world but wanted also to distinguish herself from painters she despised — amateurs, including women who made art as a pastime.
Almost every work in the show is more interesting when considered the product of both a woman artist and a bourgeois artist. In a cogent catalogue essay, Dave Beech lays the groundwork for this, using biographical and cultural data to explore Cassatt’s contempt for amateurs. As a member of the upper middle class — her father was a successful investor, her mother came from a banking family, her brother became president of a railroad — Cassatt had to work against her own class strictures to become an artist. Women could paint but only as one of the refinements, including music and needlework, that were considered proper for their sex. Making money as an artist, competing in the market, was a violation of class dignity.
Cassatt broke with the usual expectations, moved to France, made art and sold it with gusto. In part, she was forced to by her father’s reluctance to support her as an aspiring professional artist. If her contempt for women who made art as a pastime is understandable in this context, it was also ungenerous. Cassatt understood that the art world is about gatekeeping, allowing some in and others not. She earned the status of gatekeeper and could be prickly about it, expressing her displeasure in 1897 when her work was shown in the company of art by women she considered amateurs.
For all the focus on work, many of the images in this exhibition, including some of the most interesting, are about leisure. Especially when she depicts women at the theater or opera, we get closer to the world of self-fashioning, fantasy and illusion that made their highly constrained lives psychologically bearable.
And when Cassatt focused on the uncompensated work women do as mothers and caretakers, she frequently used models to create her family groupings. The rough hands of these women, which the curators see as a sign of Cassatt emphasizing their labor, might also be seen as a sign that a wealthy artist could afford to exploit the bodies of the working class.
Cassatt wrote often about work, but there are no images of her at work, nor any images of her studio. When she allowed herself to be photographed, she presented as a very proper, upper-crust woman, including in the foreground of a picture of the 17th-century chateau she purchased in 1894.
We speak too reflexively about the dignity and value of work. While celebrating the dignity and value of work that is too often discounted, including that which women do in the domestic sphere (and the work female artists such as Cassatt do representing that sphere), it’s worth pausing for reflection. The great promise of industrialization and mechanization, which helped families like the Cassatts grow rich, was supposed to yield leisure, not just huge piles of capital owned by a tiny sliver of the population. Yes, Cassatt was a pioneering female artist; she was also a member of the class that has kept most of the planet in thrall to work long after we might all do less of it.
Portraits play a significant role in this show, and there’s something curious about Cassatt’s portraiture. Very often, her subjects look faintly miserable, as if they are barely able to conceal their boredom. Her brother, the railway baron, looks bored to stupefaction in an 1884 painting that depicts him with his son, a work that is another of Philadelphia’s important but flawed Cassatt holdings. So does her mother in a portrait (circa 1889) borrowed from the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
They hated idleness, a luxury few others could afford. Cassatt was a woman who painted women and who became an ardent champion of women’s suffrage. She also carried forth the values of the class from which she came, whose members built up the great art collections of the world. If you can spare a little time off from work, go see “Mary Cassatt at Work,” where you will also enjoy the company of others who have managed to salvage a little time for leisure in an overbusy world.
Mary Cassatt at Work is on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through Sept. 8. philamuseum.org
