Word: cassatts
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Last week Twachtman received his greatest recognition so far. In his native city of Cincinnati, the art museum opened a retrospective of 134 of his works. Twachtman had none of the dramatics of Whistler, the figurative poise of Mary Cassatt, or the cheerfulness of Childe Hassam. But the show establish es him as a top-rate U.S. impressionist...
Strictly Ordered. Mary Cassatt's father, a Pittsburgh banker, had said that he would almost rather see her dead than become an artist. But she proved to have an equally strong will. During the Civil War she studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, then, at the age of 23, traveled to Paris. Degas first opened her eyes. Wrote Cassatt: "I used to go and flatten my nose against the picture dealer's window and absorb all I could of his art. It changed my life...
Where the other impressionists made a cult of painting out-of-doors, Mary Cassatt rarely left the drawing room. From the new fads for photography and Japanese prints, she introduced cropped images and flattened perspectives into her interiors. In A Cup of Tea (1880), the stripy wallpaper anchors the otherwise impossible perspective, so tilted that the tea service seems ready to slide off the picture. Yet the scene is strictly ordered. The smooth sweep from the china on the tray through the woman's hands to her lips spatially expresses a measured social gesture. The painting, on view...
Stones That Draw. Cassatt never married, but she lived a full family life until her death in 1926. Her parents, sisters, nephews and nieces were always visiting her villa on the Riviera, her Paris flat or chateau near Beauvais. Even in her old age, she had a prim, acerbic wit: she found Monet too unintelligent, criticized Renoir's lusty art as too "animal," scorned the generation of the cubists as "cafe loafers...
...great mentor Degas perhaps caught her contrary character best in his 1884 portrait. Wistful, Cassatt sits in slight supplication, knees and wrists together, her eyes deflected in reverie, her hands holding playing cards like a fan. She was appalled that he depicted her with gambler's tools, but for all her chamber-music modesty, she was not without a sense of humor. She loved recounting Degas' remark as he admired one of her many mother-and-child scenes, "It has all your qualities and all your faults," he had said, unable to resist an acid aside...