One afternoon, long after my first baby had weaned and long before my next baby was even a hope on the horizon, I found myself idly picking through some art books in a charity shop.
I plucked out a book written by one of my former art history lecturers, Prof Griselda Pollock, an icon in the art history world. The book was on the painter and printmaker Mary Cassatt, who was born in Pennsylvania but who spent most of her life in France.
I was familiar with Cassatt’s work and admired her Japanese-influenced prints. And, I was also familiar with Pollock’s work on the maternal. But Cassatt's paintings had never before grabbed my attention. As I flicked through the plates of her studies of breastfeeding, I drew a sharp intake of breath, struck by the accuracy of the detail. The paintings had been transformed for me.
Cassatt captures all of the longing and nostalgia and nostalgia-yet-to-come in paint. Her studies of mothers and infants are perhaps the most astute portrayals of the love and bonding, the ambivalence and exhaustion, the longing and the resigned that I have ever come across.
I immediately sent a photo to a friend, who had also recently weaned her daughter, and she wrote back telling me the image moved her to tears.
Born into an upper-middle-class family, Cassatt’s father was a stockbroker and her mother, descended from a family of bankers, encouraged her daughter to travel. When the teenage Cassatt decided to study painting at the Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, her parents weren’t delighted but allowed her to pursue art in any case. Cassatt moved to Paris in 1866 and took private tuition with masters from the École des Beaux-Arts, which at the time still did not admit women.
She returned to America in 1870, where her father supported her living expenses but not her artistic expenditures. She tried, without much success, to sell paintings in New York. But a commission from the Roman Catholic Bishop in Pittsburgh gave her just enough income to travel back to Europe. Within months she had work accepted for the Salon in Paris. The city would remain her base for the rest of her life.
Cassatt was an outspoken feminist, a vocal supporter of suffrage and deplored being stereotyped as a ‘woman artist’. She made radical and influential contributions artistically, but was also central to advancing knowledge and patronage of the Impressionist painters both in Europe and North America. Despite this, she tends now to only appear in the margins of art history.
The Radical Mother and Child
By the end of the 1870s she was part of the radical Impressionist group, although the artists themselves referred to themselves as Independents and Intransigents. United by the quest to find a new means of representing the rapidly changing social and economic conditions of modernity - urbanisation, secularisation, capitalism, and industrialisation - the group explored new subject-matter emerging from the changing social relations in the city.
But in addition to new subject-matter, modernity also demanded new artistic techniques, suited to capturing the pace of life. There was a negotiation of the experiences and socio-political implications of modernity. Pollock wonders if this is why there was such an emphasis on the prostitute in the brothel; the figure becomes a metonym for the social, gender and economic relations of the period.
A friend and collaborator of Edgar Degas, Cassatt mirrored his artistic focus on the dancer with her own intense, repeated studies of the relations between mother and child. How does such subject-matter relate to the quest for a modern art for modern times? How could images of mothering be deemed radical or political?
Allow me to quote Pollock at length:
‘For the artist-men of this group – such as the haute-bourgeois Manet and Degas – the spaces of urban modernity were the playgrounds of the privileged white men of the Jockey Club: theatre, opera, the courtesan’s boudoir and maisons closes. (Literally, ‘closed houses’: France permitted prostitution in officially regulated brothels in which women were confined. There was much concern about ‘free’, casual prostitution where the women were not subject to health checks). For the less socially advantaged, such as Monet or Renoir, their families and homes were the scenes of paternal images of domestic intimacy, leisure, sociality and working life. This was also true of Cassatt [...] who did not and could not visit brothels or hang out back stage at the opera and theatre to pick up under-age dancers.
In the 1870s, Cassatt, however, painted the public arena of the theatre (massively popular in Paris) as the stage of social performance by the audience, as well as a location of women’s intellectual engagement with modern drama and tragedy, often performed by Sarah Bernhardt. In the 1880s, she began to paint the social rituals of a monied American bourgeoisie that were also themes of the novels of Henry James and especially, with a feminist gloss, Edith Wharton. After the 1890s, in place of the formerly religious and mythical inflection of the human experience of the passage of time, (birth, childhood, old age) Cassatt made visible both the physical and psychological work involved in caring for a child as well as the artistic work that underpinned her paintings’ forms, coloration and surface through which her study of this aspect of modernity would be proclaimed’.1
Much of Cassatt’s work exploring woman and child capture moments of obvious mothering work: bathing the child, feeding the child, washing the child’s toes. There is an obvious physical labour involved in these tasks, as any reader who has ever filled a paddling pool with a bucket or wiped up encrusted cereal will know. As Pollock writes: ‘Cassatt does not produce modernist madonnas. No Madonna is shown working at her job’.
[Unless we consider breastfeeding a job?]
But what about Cassatt’s series of colour prints from 1891 which capture the intimate pleasure of a fleeting moment, a mother pulling her naked child into her, cheeks pressing together, arms wrapped tightly around the neck. Is this work?
While breastfeeding is a job, it is also many other things.
It is this something else, this in between which I find in Cassatt’s 1906 work Young Mother Nursing Her Child, now in the Art Institute in Chicago. The deep eye contact, the baby’s fingers exploring the mother’s mouth, the mother’s hand clutching an errant foot. The naked baby wriggles, a leg kicks at the woman’s thigh.
It is that she captures emotion in paint, pins down that feeling, and conveys it with a gesture. But this isn’t what interests me in her work, not really. The temptation is to be reductivist, and read Cassatt’s work through the prism of her being a woman, a mother perhaps. But this would be a mistake. A mistake because reading any creative act automatically as an autobiography is a mistake that is all too readily applied to art by women. But, also, simply because Cassatt never had children.
Pollock again,
‘Cassatt’s work allows us to see that words like feeling, emotion, tenderness, sentiment, character, which were also the stuff of the novels of the period, were coded terms belonging to a cultural milieu and aesthetic, not to the gender of the artist’.
Instead, Cassatt is honing in on bodies and generational differences brought on by societal expectation. Contrast the recalcitrant flesh of the child against the ‘formed gestures and learned postures’ of women from different class strata.
This was also a moment in history when childhood became an area of interest for psychologists, as well as something explored in literature. The interest in relations between the maternal figure and child therefore fitted in well with the project of modernism, despite the fact that, on the surface, the work mirrors earlier portrayals of mother/madonna and child.
But every representation of infant-feeding is born from its own specific social and cultural milieu. Invisible in the scene of parent and child are the communities within which the families belong.
There can be resonances which are shared across space and time and, of course, we bring our own personal and societal experiences with us - the lenses we wear when we look at and consider art. Interpretations of the Woman of Willendorf focused on sex and fertility, until more women entered the field of archaeology and prehistory, bringing with them differing perspectives. Or how legacies of 19th and early 20th century archaeological research has left a binary residue on interpretive paradigms of artefacts, which read that biological sex and incultured gender are binary and universal. Such residue created a narrow interpretive view of culture.
The more I look at Cassatt’s nursing images, the more I see her paintings as love letters from child to mother, the former entirely relaxed and comfortable as themselves, enveloped within the safe embrace of their mother. And, if we dare to suggest an autobiographical element to Cassatt’s work, we could say she is remembering - empathising with - what it felt like to be held by her mother.
I remember what it felt like to be held by you.
Vivid memories of maternal nurturing sustained Lousie Bourgeois, who recalled ‘I felt that what I represented was the true naked body of the child with the mother. I can still feel her body and her love’.
We tend to consider the artist as a mother, not as a child herself. Cassatt’s infants remind me that I all too often forget the receiver of milk: the child.
‘To wean’ is a transitive verb; it moves us from one place to another. The term has its roots in wenian, Old English for ‘to accustom; habituate; prepare; train; make fit’. What are we training them for with this milk? I trace those etymological branches back further to Proto-Indo-European and wenh, which means ‘to strive for; wish; love’.
This is what my milk is - something for the present, yes, but also for the future. This is why her paintings so moved me.
Remember this. And maybe, in some bat squeak echo from decades past, we do remember. The hand that fed us.
Pollock, Griselda, ‘The Overlooked Radicalism of Impressionist Mary Cassatt’, Frieze, 3 September 2018 <https://www.frieze.com/article/overlooked-radicalism-impressionist-mary-cassatt> [accessed 18 July 2021]
Thank you for this. I've long loved Cassatt's work, but you have given me new things to ponder. Our small local art museum has a mother-and-daughters sketch of hers, and it captivates me.
Such a beautiful article and thank you so much for shining a spotlight on her work, I had never heard of her. Thank you 🤍