THE INSPIRATION PLACE PODCAST
Miriam Schulman: When you lose somebody so early in life and people aren’t telling you and aren’t keeping you in, you grow invisible antennas to kind of tune in to the world, to alert you to danger. And when you grow those kind of antennas, that’s what makes you a really good artist, because you are very tuned in for picking up all the cues and really observant and watching and wary of what’s going on.
Speaker 2: It’s the Inspiration Place podcast with artist Miriam Schulman. Welcome to the Inspiration Place Podcast, an art world insider podcast for artists by an artist where each week we go behind the scenes to uncover the perspiration and inspiration behind the art. And now your host, Miriam Schulman.
Miriam Schulman: Well, hey there, my friend. This is Miriam Schulman, your curator of inspiration, and you’re listening to episode number 312 of The Inspiration Place. And I’m so excited that you’re here. So I’m about to go off and play tennis. It’s a gorgeous day in New York. And yes, we play tennis in New York City. There’s actually—I just found there’s a court right by the river, and it only cost me $100 to join this tennis association. So I couldn’t be more thrilled that I get to run around and hit the ball once in a while. Anyway, I thought I’d jump on today to record this podcast because there was an article in the New York Times that was dated Sunday, May 19th, and I’ve got some opinions on it, so I wanted to talk about it.
The article, if you want to look it up, it’s called “Mary Cassatt’s Women Didn’t Sit Pretty.” And I don’t have a problem with the title, but the author, Deborah Solomon, she talks about Mary Cassatt as a second-tier artist. She’s an artist in the second tier. The Impressionist is one of America’s greats, and I strongly, strongly, strongly disagreed with that. Mary Cassatt was like a first-rate artist and really in the first tier of it. And who did this author say is in the first tier? Well, it won’t surprise you that she says Degas or Manet.
In other words, whoever wrote this, she’s got a bit of sexism going on, even though she’s a woman. She’s really favoring the boys. And I wouldn’t say that she’s any lesser than Degas. If I were to say who’s in the top, top, top tier, you should definitely put Berthe Morisot in there because she is like one of the founding members of this whole movement. And Cassatt did have a huge influence on this group. So, that opinion aside, oh, and there was something else I strongly disagreed with this author about as well. But that aside, I’m going to talk to you about why we’re talking about Mary Cassatt, what I think is so wonderful about her, and places you can go see her this year.
Mary Cassatt is, maybe I don’t have to tell you, she is known as the painter of mothers and babies, although she also has some really stunning works that do not depict any children. One of her really great paintings is “Woman in a Loge,” which depicts a woman at the opera. Another one is called “The Tea,” featuring two women together. Her paintings are very psychological, with a lot of hidden meanings and nuances.
They really do talk to the viewer and paint a narrative, not quite unlike what Edith Wharton did with her novels, which was more or less the same. Well, I think Mary Cassatt’s a little bit prior to Edith Wharton, but it’s kind of a similar Victorian-esque era. So she was a post-Civil War artist. She left America after the Civil War to move to Paris. She grew up in huge wealth and privilege. In fact, I think her brother became the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, so obviously she was upper, upper, upper class in America that she could afford actually to do this.
She did not have a romantic relationship with Degas, as was previously speculated. In fact, if anything, more modern scholars have noted that she had a very close relationship with her maid. I don’t know if “maid” is the right word. Assistant? Yeah. So it could be that she just valued her assistant a lot, but it seems that she left, like, she bequeathed her estate to her maid and companion. Matilda Valet. Very interesting that that’s actually her last name. So Matilda Valet was bequeathed a chunk of cash and also all of her artwork—300 paintings, pastels, and prints that were in the collection that were not already sold to other people.
One thing that is very important about Mary Cassatt, in addition to her art, is the work that she did as, like, an art consultant. So she had a friendship with Louisine Havemeyer, who was a very important American collector. And Mary Cassatt really is the one who could be credited with bringing Impressionist art to America, because she had these relationships with the upper class, and she was a champion of her peers in bringing that art to America and to that upper crust that she was a part of, those circles she traveled in.
One of the reasons that Mary Cassatt is getting more attention right now is we’re approaching the hundredth anniversary of her death, so that has inspired a new round of exhibitions and books. We will link to all of that in the show notes.
Her first major exhibition is coming to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and it opens this weekend, meaning June 2024. So if you’re listening to this in June, you can travel to Philadelphia to see it, and then that exhibition will travel in the fall to the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco.
I don’t think I’m going to get to see either of those. Maybe I’ll go to Philadelphia, though, because that could be super fun. I could just hop on the train from New York to Philadelphia. I love Mary Cassatt. She’s truly an astounding artist. I’m going to talk more about why I’m going to promote her as being such an astounding artist. I just wanted to get some of these juicy biographical details in here.
So, other things that they say about Mary Cassatt is she was five-six. She had gray eyes, and she wasn’t afraid to tell you what she thought. The way this particular author described it, or this reporter, as a caustic manner, I can totally imagine what kind of person she is. Maybe a little like me, actually. I do not mince my words. So, she never married, she never had children, and she worked on her art. She was in the center of the French avant-garde. And according to this author, this reporter, whose sources I questioned because he keeps repeating very chauvinistic things about Mary Cassatt, was that she discovered Degas after admiring his pastels. I’m going to, like, put a pin there. I’m going to do some additional research and see if that’s really true, because that sounds like a very male chauvinist way of describing that Mary Cassatt found Degas, and I’m not sure that that was completely true.
I think that their friendship evolved, actually, from going to the Louvre together and both copying paintings. That’s the story I remember. So I will look that up, and hopefully, in a future episode of the podcast, I will let you know what I’ve discovered. Apparently, Degas invited her to exhibit alongside the fellow French Impressionists, and she was the only American who actually exhibited with them.
One comment about the Philadelphia exhibition opening: you know how sometimes they put quotes of the artists up on the wall? So the Philadelphia Museum, they’re putting this quote on the wall which says, “What one would like to believe behind one is superior art and a hidden personality.”
One thing that she did that is kind of unfortunate for art historians is that all of Mary Cassatt’s letters, diaries, account books, calling cards were destroyed before or upon her death. So we don’t really have a first-person narrative from Cassatt about her relationships or her thoughts. We just have the results of her art.
Right now, I am looking at a gorgeous painting that was included in this article. It’s called “Maternal Caress” from 1896, and it depicts a very chubby blond baby with her hand on the mom’s face, and the mother is holding the child’s arm. One thing I did learn in this article is that, of course, it’s supposed to depict a mother and child, but Cassatt would actually pair models with children who weren’t necessarily related, just had the physical types that she preferred.
All of her women are good examples of body positive women. They’re full figured. The babies are also very chubby, and a lot of the flesh are the cheeks and the arms, you know, like like chubby arms with ringlets and chubby fingers and moms that are full figured. And so I find that to be very interesting. It says she was not interested in painting the nude figure. There is one Japanese print that is known by her that is called Woman Bathing that dates from about 1890. It has that Japanese style that she favored, but it only depicts a nude woman so it would be perfectly appropriate for Instagram. A thing that I really admire about all three of these paintings that I see in the article, one was, like I said, maternal caress, the second woman bathing, the third, the boating party, is her use of negative space.
Like if you look at all three of them, just the negative space doesn’t just exist. It’s it really has beautiful shapes of its own. So if you were to squint your eyes and look at this almost as an abstract painting, all the compositional forms are very, very strong. The background really just holds a shapes that are very appealing. One thing that I thought was very interesting about the Boating Party is the way the man has his oars going across the entire canvas, and you got to believe this is a statement about the patriarchy. Basically the woman and the child is behind shown in the background of the boat, and the man is in the foreground of this painting with his back to us, and his arm is outstretched. And it’s really you can’t break through. So that’s got to be a statement about women not being able to rise, you know, being held back by, um, only having their role, being mother child. I mean, I just don’t see any other reading of this. If you have a different reading, I would love to hear it. So you can leave a comment on my Instagram. I’m @SchulmanArt, it’s spelled with a C. You can email me miriam@theinspirationplace.net. You can also leave a review of the podcast The Inspiration Place leave a review there. Tell me what you think, even if it’s negative, I welcome your opinion because I really do want to know what you think.
Also, if you’re listening to this on my, uh, website, you can leave a comment there. Schulmanart.com/312 and we will try to put the boating party, the Boating Party from 1893. We’ll put that into the show notes as well, so that you can see it. And that will help you make a comment about that as well as the oher artwork maternal crass. And we should probably put the the other painting that’s in here as well. Okay. So then the other thing that I disagreed with this author is. I mean, is she for real? I mean, is this really 2024? Okay. So what is she saying is that “Oh, Cassatt isn’t showing women working.” And then I’m just going to quote the reporter, and you can. She says, “Yes, of course, motherhood is work. Lots of it. On the other hand, it’s hard to accept the premise that Cassatt’s painting take as their subject the aches and pains of unpaid labor, as Cassatt remained securely seated in the upper class milieu from which she sprang.” You know, actually, I do kind of agree with that, that she’s not, because she probably wasn’t part of, you know, all the women that she knew probably all had nannies.
So I’m not so sure. I think she was making more of a statement about women being held back by it. But then she says, oh, it’s not the real work. Like, uh, Degat’s bone weary Laundresses or Gustav’s floor scrapers. So I don’t know. I don’t know, maybe I soured on the the reporter because of her comment about Cassatt being a second tier artist, which I’ve never I mean, I was always so inspired by her. Mary Cassatt is one of the reasons I decided to become a portrait artist for Real and paint children’s portraits. So, yeah, don’t mess with Mary Cassatt. You’re not going to make friends with me when you do. And I’m not saying that she’s not at fault or I mean that she’s going to be above criticism, but I just don’t agree with this reporter. One thing that I learned from this article, though, is that she had a brother who passed away, I think, when she was seven. So she had a brother who had some sort of disease, maybe bone cancer. And so he had been sick for like four years. When they were seven, they moved to Europe to treat him. But when he was two days after Mary turned 11 is when he passed away.
So that’s really hard to have death so young. She had five siblings, and the one who passed away of bone cancer was the one closest in age. And that’s something also that happens when you lose somebody so early in life. And I don’t know how they treated death back in this century. I know when I when my father died, they didn’t talk to children about death. So what happens if you lose someone and people aren’t telling you and aren’t keeping you in? You grow invisible antennas to kind of tune in to the world, to alert you to danger. And when you grow those kind of antennas, that’s what makes you a really good artist, because you are very tuned in for picking up all the cues and really observant and watching and weary of what’s going on. So. That was an interesting part of her biography that I did not know before. Okay, so there’s also going to be an exhibition next year at the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown. So if any of you have a partner who is a baseball enthusiast, that might be a nice trip to take together that you can go to Cooperstown and they can go to the Baseball Hall of Fame and and you can go see Mary Cassatt.
Okay, so she hardly ever painted men, which is interesting to note. Like, the Boatman is in there, and I don’t know who else is in there. I know that in terms of the Boating Party, it definitely has a man in it. That one is a painting homage to Manet’s boating. One thing I want to add: This particular author didn’t talk about this painting, but one of my favorite paintings that Cassatt has done was a painting of a girl reclining in a chair with a dog, and she just had her legs splayed open. She is not ladylike at all. One of the things this reporter does note is she was speculating whether the reason why she painted such babies in good health was because she had that early loss, so that is possible that she’s maybe trying to recreate these angels of who her brother was. And the Cassatt women, she does not depict them as prostitutes. They don’t smoke, they don’t drink. They are not objects for men. They are usually very plain-looking, and they lean more towards what we might call body-positive shapes. Women in her paintings are there for themselves and for each other, and they’re not dancing around in the constrictive corsets that were popular during that time.
Alright, so that’s all I’m going to say about Mary Cassatt. I see it’s time for me to head off to my tennis, so I would love to hear from you. What do you think of Mary Cassatt? What do you think of the paintings and this museum? Are you going to be able to see any of her art? I know she also has art in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as in Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts. So if you’re in any of those places, it’d be wonderful to go see her art in person. If not, you can check out some of the reproductions in the books that we have linked up for you, and we will be creating a segment on my Amazon storefront for Mary Cassatt, because she’s a first-tier artist. You can find my storefront and there’s lots of goodies and curations there for you. I’ve curated a lot of things over there. You can find that at SchulmanArt.com/store, or you can search for Schulman Art or The Inspiration Place over on Amazon, and you’ll find it that way too.
Alright, my friend, thank you so much for being with me here today. I’ll see you the same time, same place next week. Until then, stay inspired.
Speaker 2: Thank you for listening to The Inspiration Place podcast. Connect with us on Facebook at facebook.com/schulmanart, on Instagram @schulmanart and of course, on SchulmanArt.com.
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