The Female Gaze: Mary Cassatt’s Paintings Of Women And Children by Donald Kuspit

Edgar Degas, Young Spartans Excercising, 1860, oil on canvas, 109.5 cm × 155 cm (43.1 in × 61 in), National Gallery, London
 

By DONALD KUSPIT September 3, 2024

The child who is to survive psychologically is born into an empathic-responsive human milieu (of self-objects) just as he is born into an atmosphere that contains an optimal amount of oxygen if he is to survive physically.  And his nascent self “expects” an empathic environment to be in tune with his need-wishes with the same unquestionable certitude as the respiratory apparatus of the newborn infant may be said to “expect” oxygen to be contained in the surrounding atmosphere.  

Heinz Kohut, The Restoration Of The Self(1)

Degas had a curious aptitude for mimicry.  The dancers and ironers he chose for subject are shown in the attitudes that characterize their work….His passion was to reconstruct the body of the female animal as the specialized slave of the dance, the laundry…or the streets; and the more or less distorted bodies whose articulated structure he always arranges in very precarious attitudes (tying a ballet shoe, or driving the iron over the cloth with both fists) make the whole structural mechanism of a living being seem to grimace like a face….

There was an element of misogyny in his enjoyment.  A moment ago I spoke of the female animal:  that, I fear, was the right term.  Didn’t Huysmans write that Degas felt nothing but repulsion for the dancers he painted?

Paul Valery, Degas Dance Drawing(2)

I begin with the relationship of Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas, who worked together for years—in 1877 she was invited by him to exhibit her works with the Impressionists—“Independents” or “Intransigents” in view of the rejection of their “experimental” works by the Salon.  She learned much from him, as she acknowledged, and experimented with materials, as he did—she used “distemper and metallic paints in many works,” and became “extremely proficient in the use of pastels”—Degas’ pastels “made a powerful impression on her” when she first saw them in 1875 in the window of an art dealer’s gallery.  But I am less interested in exploring their well-documented professional relationship, than in the fact that Cassatt was a feminist and Degas was misogynist.  And in the fact that Degas was an antisemite—he thought Dreyfus was guilty of treason, even after he was exonerated, and his portrait of the Jewish banker Ernest Mayer is widely regarded as anti-Semitic—while she painted a portrait of Moses Dreyfus, a relative of the scapegoated Lieutenant Dreyfus.  “Cassatt was an outspoken advocate for women’s equality, campaigning with her friends for equal travel scholarships for students in the 1860s, and the right to vote in the 1910s.”  “Cassatt depicted the ‘New Woman’ of the 19^th century from the woman’s perspective.”  She painted a 12 foot by 58 foot mural about “Modern Woman” for the Woman’s Building for the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893.  The commission came from Bertha Palmer, a successful businesswoman.  She regarded Cassatt as an “American treasure.”  Mary Cassatt was deeply influenced by—identified with—her “intelligent and active mother, Katherine Cassatt, who believed in educating women to be knowledgeable and socially active.”  She is depicted in Reading ‘Le Figaro’, 1878.  “Cassatt’s independence and choice to not marry as a ‘New Woman’ could also be seen as a reaction to the strict institutionalized misogamy of the art world at the time, as marriage could also be seen as unserious and incompatible with any serious artistic career that she was fighting to be recognized for.”

I regard Degas’ antisemitism and misogyny as complementary or coordinate.  This is suggested by the fact that he “refused to use models who he believed to be Jewish.”  It is worth noting that “he remained an outspoken anti-Semite and member of the anti-Semitic ‘Anti-Dreyfusards’ until his death.”  The scholar Sandor Gilman has shown that “the prejudices of biology in the nineteenth century classified the Jew as somehow feminine,” involving “the belief in Jewish male menstruation,” that is, the antisemitic belief that Jewish men had menstrual periods or periodic bleeding, through nosebleeds, urination, and bleeding of hemorrhoids.  Menstruation is supposedly a curse:  women were cursed because Eve had committed the original sin of eating fruit God had forbidden her and Adam and Jewish men were cursed with menstruation for crucifying Christ.  I suggest that Degas’ misogyny and antisemitism were rooted in his fear of becoming a woman—castration anxiety.  His ballet dancers were young girls—his sculpture of one epitomizes their immaturity, all the more so because she seems not to have begun menstruating, suggesting her innocence, purity, naivete—she’s dispassionately displayed, and the matter of fact way—mechanical realism--with which he represents her suggests she has no “romantic” feelings let alone “personality.”   Men and women—boys and girls—are always at odds, innately and irreconcilable antagonists, as Young Spartan Girls Challenging Boys, ca. 1860 and The Interior (Rape Scene), ca. 1868? make clear.  The man finally wins the war of the sexes, as The Dance Class, 1874 strongly suggests.  The elderly dance master dominates, the immature ballerinas submit.  He instructs, they obey.  He is their master, they are his slaves.  Degas’ adolescent ballerinas remind me of the life-sized dancing doll invented by Dr. Coppelius in the ballet that premiered in Paris in 1870. 

Edgar Degas, The Dance Class, 1874

Degas depicted laundresses and prostitutes as well as ballerinas, taking “not the slightest pains to beautify them,” Valery notes.  Degas said he viewed women “as if…through a keyhole,” indicating that he was a voyeur, obtaining sexual gratification by spying on them rather than copulating with them.  A keyhole is a rather small, narrow hole, like the opening of a vagina, suggesting that seeing through a keyhole meant performing cunninglingus.  Degas said he preferred “women unconcerned by any other interests than those involved in their physical condition.”  In other words women who were all body and mindless, not to say soulless, that is, with no inner life—women who were depersonalized and derealized, and as such were staged dummies.  The numerous images of laundresses as well as ballerinas—both all bodies and no minds--makes this clear.  The Festival of the Owner, 1876-1877 makes it clear that Degas visited houses of prostitution.  But woman’s mystery remains, and it was located between her legs, as many of his bathers and prostitutes—implicitly the same—make clear.  The woman in The Letter, ca. 1882-1885 masturbates as she reads it, a woman urinates into a Chamber Pot, ca.1880-1885, and the vagina is the conspicuous focus in, Two Women—Scene From A Brothel and Resting On A Bed both ca. 1877-1879.  In Make An Attempt, 1876-1877 four naked prostitutes are lined up on a couch, the legs of the one that confronts us on the left are spread wide apart, her hairy vagina confronting us, the other three more or less similarly posed, their hairy vaginas exposed, despite the fact that their legs are close together.  Confronted with them, Degas must have had castration anxiety, describing them a defense against it.  The art historian Raisa Rexer notes that Degas’ prostitutes—and young ballet dancers were prostitutes in their off-hours, as Manet’s Masked Ball At The Opera, 1873 makes clear—are as anonymous as the females in the pornographic photographs popular at the time.  She suggests that Degas’ brothel scenes offer in place of them “an ultimately sympathetic rendering of the realities of prostitution.”  I find this dubious; Ingres had no sympathy for ballet dancers or prostitutes; they were soulless bodies.  As The Client, 1879 shows, Degas made it clear that prostitution is a business, that prostitutes are no more than bodies for sale.  I suggest that his female bathers are prostitutes washing their bodies after it has serviced a client (or many). 

Masked Ball at the Opera (1873), Édouard Manet (French, 1832-1883)

The male gaze does not simply view the female body as a sexual object, and with that strips woman of her personhood and soul—the story of Susanna and the Elders epitomizes it—but devalues the female body by regarding it as an abstract form, dehumanizing it completely.  Woman’s body becomes not so much an erotic spectacle, the tantalizing object of impulsive desire, uncontrollably intense, but an ingenious construction and with that a conceptual mystery.  One might say that the Elders find the form of Susanna’s body aesthetically fascinating, leading them to try to fathom its mystery—the so-called mystery of woman—by analyzing it:  which is what Degas does in work after work.  Degas’ line is famously definitive—in 1855 he met Ingres, whom he admired, and who advised him to “draw lines…and still more lines, both from life and from memory”–advice he never forgot.  Degas’ line was not spontaneous—“gestural”—but carefully constructed:  “no art was ever less spontaneous than mine.”  His line is “the result of reflection,” suggesting his art is peculiarly conceptual:  he is interested in the concept, the idea, the “Platonic” form of the female body not in its materiality.  As Andrew Forge wrote, his figures were “linear arrangements,” and as such more of cognitive than emotional interest:  locked in a linear vise and claustrophobic space, epitomized by the claustrophobic space of the tub in which we see a naked woman bathing in several paintings made in 1886 and 1887, his female figures have no empathic appeal, whether naked or dressed.  His fundamental indifference to woman as individuals and human beings is epitomized by his portrait of the painter Henri Michel-Levy, 1878, a surrogate for himself, standing indifferently, hands in his pockets, next to a female figure, collapsed on the floor next to him, perhaps a doll, perhaps a model tired of posing for him.  

Mary Cassatt, The Child's Bath, 1893, oil on canvas, 100.3 cm × 66.1 cm (39.5 in × 26 in), Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago

There is not the slightest hint of empathy—let alone responsive care--for any of the human beings, be they dancers or laundresses or prostitutes--any woman--Degas depicted, nor for that matter any man, as The Steeplechase:  The Fallen Jockey, 1866 (reworked later) suggests.  There is no sign of what the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott calls a “holding environment,” and what the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion calls “containment” in any of Degas’ paintings of people.  Both generate “empathy,” regarded as modes of empathy.  In Cassatt’s The Boating Party, 1893 a mother protectively holds a child, in Cassatt’s The Child’s Bath, 1893 a mother holds a child from falling as the child puts her feet in a basin of water, in Little Girl in a Blue Armchair a little girl reclines in a sky blue armchair as though in her heavenly mother’s lap, her pet dog in a similar armchair next to her.  In Mother and Child, ca. 1905 a mother holds a naked child in her lap.  The child is looking at its face in a mirror.  In The Child’s Bath, 1893 a mother holds a naked child with her left arm while she tests the water in a bathtub with her right hand.  In Jules Being Dried By His Mother, 1900 the young Jules stands proudly upright as his mother gazes at him as she dries his lower body with a clean white towel after his bath.  In Mother Holding Her Baby, 1914 a mother supports a naked baby who reaches to her right shoulder and in Mother and Child, also 1914 a naked child embraces his mother’s neck as she holds him upright.  In Baby Lying on His Mother’s Lap, reaching to hold a scarf, 1914 a mother looks down on the smiling baby, as though to assure herself that he is comfortable and happy.  In Nude Baby on Mother’s Lap Resting Her Arm on the Back of the Chair, 1913,the upright baby stares at the spectator, secure despite the stranger’s glance.  In The Crochet Lesson and Mother and Child Reading, both 1913, young girls are held in their mother’s arms as they learn adult skills.  In Mother and Child, 1880 they embrace, and in Mother About to Wash her Sleepy Child, 1880 they look at each other fondly.  In the two versions of Susan Comforting the Baby, 1881 their heads meet in reassuring intimacy.  The Woman and Child Seated in a Garden, 1881 are inseparable.  The woman is in virginal white, but she is emotionally the mother of the child.  There is a tenderness in the handling of all these works, officially Impressionist, but often enough with a painterly briskness, giving them expressionist credentials.  Indeed, the background in Master Robert Kelso Cassatt is fervently abstract expressionist, or is it abstract impressionist, considering the fact that Kandinsky’s abstract expressionist paintings grew out of his “impressions,” as he called them.  I am arguing that Cassatt was a prescient modernist, even as many of her paintings of mother and child are reminiscent of paintings of Madonna and Child, certainly evoke them.  Cassatt’s scenes of great intimacy between mother and child are unparalleled in American art and I venture to say in European art.  They are more original and insightful than any of the many cliched Madonna and Child paintings in European art, for Cassett’s have a verve and energy, a kind of libidinous intensity, the European religious paintings lack, impressionist paintings being made for enjoyment not blind worship. And Cassatt’s “Madonna and Child” are individuals not stereotypes forced to conform to a religious cliché, not to say an ideological Procrustean bed.  I venture to say Cassatt’s paintings come out of happiness not suffering—unlike Degas’s paintings, which are the products of repressed passion. 

Mary Cassatt, Young Woman Sewing In A Garden

Degas had “little tenderness for anything,” Valery writes.  Cassatt’s paintings of women and children are all about tenderness, an expression of empathy.  Even when Cassatt depicts women without children, in solitude, as in The Cup of Tea, ca. 1879-1881, Young Woman Sewing In A Garden, 1886, Woman Reading In A Garden, 1880, Woman With A Fan, 1880 and The Pensive Reader, 1894 or as companions, as in The Loge, ca. 1878-1880, The Tea, 1880, Madame Meerson and Her Daughter, 1899, and The Visit, 1890, she conveys empathy for them, by way of her handling, her “spontaneous gesture,” to use the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s term, expressive evidence of the individuality of the True Self, as he said—in contrast to the False Self, a socially compliant self—the self pictured in the traditional academic art that the Impressionists rebelled against, rejected as inauthentic.  “The spontaneous gesture is the True Self in action.  Only the True Self can be creative and only the True Self can feel real.  Whereas the True Self feels real, the existence of a False Self results in a feeling unreal or a sense of futility”—the sense of futility that informs, pervades Degas’s pictures of women, be they ballerinas, laundresses, prostitutes.  I suggest that Degas’ preoccupation—obsession—with their bodies is a defense against his own sense of futility.  I suggest that there is no spontaneity without empathy—that spontaneity is an expression of empathy.  “The job of painting a portrait entails something akin to obsequiousness, against which creative power puts up a fight,” declared the art historian Max J. Friedlander.(3)  But that is true if the portrait painter has no empathy for the person portrayed, as seems the case in the portraits of Leonardo, Bronzino, and Titian—in official “public” portraits in general--but not in Rembrandt’s portraits of Hendrickje Stoffels, Van Gogh’s portraits of the Roulin family and Toulouse-Lautrec’s portraits of entertainers and prostitutes.  Empathy brings with it insightful intimacy—what Jacques Maritain calls creative intuition--into the inner life of the person portrayed.  I believe that Cassatt had greater intuitive insight into the mothers and children and women she portrayed than Rembrandt, Van Gogh, and Toulouse-Lautrec had into the individuals they portrayed because she projectively identified with them, that is, they became an extension of her identity.  The mothers had the children she never had, but then she gave birth to her paintings of them, and in immortalizing them she immortalized herself.  Projective identification can become “the basis of empathy,”(4) the empathy self-evident in Cassatt’s portraits, in the spontaneity and responsiveness of her gestures, her impressionist “technique.”    

Note:  Despite their incompatible personalities, particularly with respect to their attitude to women not to say mothers--Degas depicted one in The Bellelli Family, 1860-1862, where she is alienated from her husband; she stands apart from him with her two children; in The Mante Family, 1889 there is no father, only a mother and her two children, suggesting her alienation from her husband is complete (I suggest that Degas not so unconsciously hated mothers and children}—Degas agreed to work with Cassatt even though she was a woman because she was wealthy, and with that “aristocratic,” as he  was—he was born into an aristocratic family, the De Gas, more particularly a wealthy banking family--and because she admired his work, which no doubt satisfied his narcissism, not to say his grandiose view of himself.  Her father was a successful stockbroker and land speculator, and her brother was the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. WM

Notes

(1) Heinz Kohut, The Restoration Of The Self (New York:  International Universities Press, 1977), 85

(2) Paul Valery, “Degas Dance Drawing,” Degas Manet Morisot (New York:  Pantheon, 1960), 56-57

(3) Max J. Friedlander, Landscape Portrait Still-Life (New York:  Schoken Books, 1963), 232

(4) For a fuller account of “projective identification” see the entry on it in Salman Akhtar, Comprehensive Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (London:  Karnac, 2009), 224