In Which There Is Something About Paris This Time of Year

Mary Cassatt: An American in Paris

by HILTON KRAMER

The career of Mary Cassatt is one of the most remarkable in the history of American art. So remarkable, indeed, that only Henry James, whom she apparently disliked and disapproved of, might have done justice to both her personal story and the artistic achievement that is its principal ornament. What a pity that he never interested himself in this subject, which is the eyes of posterity has assumed so many of the features of a Jamesian fiction.

There was, first of all, the indelible mark of her European upbringing. Born in 1844 in Allegheny City, now part of Pittsburgh, she was taken as a child to live in Paris, Heidelberg, and Darmstadt. Her parents were amateurs of French culture, her father a businessman who could never really get interested in making a fortune. They lived for a time in Germany to provide their son Alexander - Mary's older brother — with the technological education his gifts seemed best suited to, and thus launched him on a career that led to his becoming president of the Pennsylvania Railroad.

In 1858 the Cassatt family returned to the United States, settling in Philadelphia, and by 1860 Mary Cassatt — at the age of sixteen — was already determined to be an artist. There is a reference that year in one of Alexander's letters about plans for her to study in Rome. These plans never quite materialized, but the next year she entered the Pennsylvania Academy.

The kind of academic art instruction available to an ambitious student in Philadelphia in the 1860s proved unequal to her ambitions, and by 1866 she had persuaded her father to allow her to study abroad. She went first to Paris, however, rather than to Rome, probably because the Cassatt family's social connections in the French capital assured her of a style of life consistent with their strict bourgeois standards of respectability.

For the next few years — in France, Italy, Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands - she steeped herself in the Old Masters, having found the academic instruction available in Paris no more to her taste than what she had found in Philadelphia. Her true masters, she later said, were Manet, Courbet and Degas, and when at least her pictures were give a place beside theirs, her fondest dreams were realized.

"I began to live," she told her French biographer in 1913, sounding more than ever like the quintessential Jamesian heroine. But Mary Cassatt gave the Jamesian fable a special twist. To the artistic vocation, usually reserved in James' fiction for his male characters, she brought all the independence and determination, all the courage and ambition, of the Jamesian heroine in search of romance. For art was indeed the great romance of her life, there being no evidence of any other.

She began submitting her pictures to the official Salon in Paris, and one of these — a small portrait of a woman — happened to be noticed by Degas in the Salon of 1874. He pronounced it "genuine" — high praise from an artist known to be a misogynist and never renowned for lavishing extravagant compliments on the work of his contemporaries. Three years later he sought her out - she was, by then, permanently settled in Paris — and invited her to join the "Independent" group of painters already known as Impressionists. In this, too, there is an irony worthy of a Jamesian scenario, for Mary Cassatt thus passed into the history of modern art under the banner of a style that ill-describes either her interests or her achievements.

"I will not admit that a woman can draw so well" — Degas' famous back-handed tribute to Cassatt's draftsmanship remains an important key to an understanding of her work. She had little of the Impressionists' interest in outdoor effects of light. She was not really a distinguished colorist. She produced few landscapes, and these are never her strongest or most personal pictures. She was primarily interested in the figure — in portraiture, in fact, and in that radical revision of pictorial space for which the Impressionist generation found inspired precedents in the Japanese print. Degas, who repudiated the Impressionist label, was the great exemplar of the style she aspired to, and he became the guiding spirit of her work.

In the biography of Mary Cassatt that Frederick A. Sweet published in 1966, he wrote that she "was not a very inventive painter and could prosper only when she was surrounded by strong influences." The question raised in this harsh judgment is certainly the one that haunts the visitor to the large retrospective exhibition of her work at the National Gallery of Art.

This is the largest exhibition of her work we have ever had - one hundred paintings, pastels, and graphic works. The career they trace is so interesting, the artistic intelligence embodied in the finest examples so forceful, and the incidental charm of her work so engaging, that one is reluctant to admit, even to oneself, a certain dissatisfaction with the exhibition as a whole. But the admission must be made. There is simply not the pressure here to sustain an exhibition on this scale. This dissatisfaction fades, of course, in the presence of her undoubted masterpieces. The greatest of these, in my opinion, is the portrait of her mother, "Reading Le Figaro" (1883).

This marvellous painting, all whites and grays, is a triumph of pictorial realization. The design, with its mirror-image locking the figure into a space that is totally felt, achieves a perfection rare for this painter. The figure, moreover, is beautifully integrated into this space — unlike so many of Cassatt's figures, which seem to exist in a physical realm almost separate from the space they occupy. Then, too, there is the iron grasp of character, a psychological dimension that raises the painting to a height all its own. Seeing this picture, one can well understand why Gauguin, comparing Cassatt to Berthe Morisot, declared, "Miss Cassatt has as much charm, but she has more power."

The power could not be sustained, however. The truth seems to be that few subjects moved Mary Cassatt as deeply as her mother, and she was the kind of painter who needed a subject that moved her — moved her beyond the boundaries of "pictorial problems" into a more personal realm of inspired expression. She was repeatedly drawn to the subject of children, and with certain exceptions — the best, I think, is the "Child in a Straw Hat" (1886) — these repeatedly failed her.

Degas characterized one of these pictures as "little Jesus with his English governess" and his remark sums up a great deal of what still troubles us about this aspect of Cassatt's work. The exhibition is certainly welcome, nonetheless. What remains so impressive about Mary Cassatt as an artist, even beyond her isolated masterpieces, is the absolute seriousness of her work. She aspired to the highest standards of her day, and she knew what they were. She felt nothing but contempt for compromises with fashionable or official taste. She was, in the best sense, an Independent — James' "passionate pilgrim," unwilling to settle for innocence, provincialism, or a fate determined by moribund custom.

Hilton Kramer was born in 1928. You can purchase his collection of essays, The Age of the Avant-Garde, here.

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In Which Hilton Kramer And Wassily Kandinsky Share A Poignant Moment

Kandinsky: The Last Decade

by HILTON KRAMER

We tend to forget the extent to which the careers of certain modern artists have been affected by the violent vicissitudes of modern politics. Consider the case of Kandinsky. There is little in his work of any period to suggest it was created in anything but the most placvid external circumstances. The early landscapes have a positively idyllic quality. The early "Compositions" and "Improvisations" are likewise lyric in mood, though more and more metaphysical in their fundamental concerns. Thereafter, the "events" reflected in his painting are all of an intellectual and mystical order.

Attention is paid to certain changes taking place in the evolution of pictorial form, but there are a few signs that history or even the normal tribulations of the individual psyche have made the slightest impression on the artist's aesthetic faculties.

Yet in actual fact, Kandinsky lived through some of the stormiest moments in modern history. Twice in a lifetime he was obliged to uproot himself from Germany - the scene of his greatest artistic triumphs and, for all practical purposes, his permanent home. The outbreak of the First World War forced him to return to his native Russia on the eve of the Revolution. Though the exact degree of his committment to the Bolshevik program has always remained obscure, he became a leader in the historic, short-lived alliance between the Russian avant-garde and revolutionary government. He functioned as both a bureaucrat and a teacher, establishing new museums, serving on committees, and even taking an academic post at the University of Moscow.

He returned to Germany in December 1921 and was very shortly appointed to the faculty of Bauhaus in Weimar. Kandinsky was thus a major figure in the two most amibitious attempts to align the aethetics of abstract art with the political goals of radical socialism. He remained at the Bauhaus until it was closed by the Nazis in 1933, and in the fall of that year he moved to Paris.

Kandinsky was then sixty-six years old. He died at Neuilly eleven years later. This so-called Parisian period was perhaps the most difficult of his entire career, and few writers have paid it close attention. Yet Kandinsky remained extremely productive in these last years.

According to Will Grohmann, he painted 144 pictures and over two hundred watercolors and gouaches in this final decade of his life. To judge by the fifty-odd examples at M. Knoedler & Company, they are works which stand somewhat apart from anything Kandinsky had produced earlier.

The manner of exeuction in these late paintings still follows very closely the "tight" style of the Bauhaus years. Every image is very precisely delineated. Every element in the design is clearly legible. Every form is given an emphatic contour, which color - generally applied in dry, flat manner - is not permitted to violate. There is a general disposition towards geometricity.

Yet what impresses one most about these paintings is not the qualities they share with the work of the Bauhaus period, but an element that had long been suprressed in Kandinsky's art - the element of poetic fantasy. Kandinsky now appears to draw closer to two artists - Arp and Miró - whose early work he had himself influenced.

Indeed, a comparison with Miró is scarcely avoidable, for in painting after painting in these years, Kandinsky seems all but obsessed with the kind of freewheeling poetry that Miro - working under the fecund pressures of the Surrealist movement - had turned to such inventive pictorial effect. Certain pictures of this period - "Delicate Accent" (1935), "Center with Accompaniment" (1937), "Elan" (1939), "One Figure among Others" (1939), "Sky Blue" (1940), and others - are scarcely imaginable without Miró.

What is interesting here is not the influence of one artist on another - such influence is, after all, a commonplace - but the particular use to which this influence was put. No one, so far as I know, has described the effect of Surrealism on Kandinsky's later work, but I would judge the effect to have been a powerful one. There are reasons, of course, why French critics would shy away from the problem. In Paris in the thirties - an indeed, until just the other day - the intellectual enmity separating the partisans of Surrealism from the partisans of geometrical abstraction was intense and unforgiving, and Kandinsky was presumed, not incorrectly, to belong to the camp of the geometrical painters.

Apparently Kandinsky himself had cordial personal relations with a number of Surrealists, including Miro and Breton, but critically he was located elsewhere.

Autumn in Bavaria, 1908And what we see in Kandinsky's later work is not a conversion to Surrealism, but a struggle to move into the orbit of Surrealist freedom - at least as that freedom was exemplified in the work of Miró and Arp - while retaining the same rigor of design, the same logical procedures, the same philosophical outlook that were, by this time, the very substance of his vision.

There is a construction in Kandinsky's later work - and a yearning to be free of it - that has nothing to do with talent and everything to do with the artist's emotions and ideas. Comparing these late Kandinsky's with Miro's paintings of the thirties one can see what a radical advantage it was for Miró to have immersed himself in the poetry of eroticism and to have committed his art to the whole prolonged assault on the unconscious that Surrealism took as its special province.

In lieu of this immersion in the erotic, Kandinsky had only his devotion to the "spiritual," his committment to a mode of expression "outside space and time." In this last decade of his career, geometric form gives way to biomorphic form - again in contrast to its use in Arp and Miró - seems singularly devoid of any existential correlative. The impulse to poetic fantasy is strongly and repeatedly expressed, but it seems to lack any real roots in the artist's experience. In the end, Kandinsky's concept of the "spiritual" was too bloodless perhaps, too metaphysical and otherworldly, to permit him to become the kind of pictorial poet he saw triumphantly at work in Miró. We are given the design of an imaginary universe, but not the thing itself.

However one judges these late works, though, they constitute a very moving and interesting chapter in an extraordinary career. They also tell us something important about Parisian art in the thirties, which Kandinskhy came to as an exile and a refugee. And they remind us, too, that we have not yet had a really comprehensive biography of this painter who, in the face of the most momentuous historical turmoil, continued to produce works of art of amazing detachment.

November 9, 1969

Hilton Kramer is the founder of The New Criterion.

joan miro

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