Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol.original_ [82]
Degas, “The Little 14-Year-Old Dancer,” 1879-81, cast in 1922, MMA, NY. Degas sculpted this figure in wax when his eyesight was failing and he had to create by touch.
SUPPORTING CAST
Besides the four major Impressionist artists, other notable painters working in the style were Cassatt, Morisot, and Pissarro.
CASSATT. Although he hated to admit a woman could draw so well, when Degas first saw Mary Cassatt’s (pronounced Cah SAT; 1845-1926) work, he said, “There is a person who feels as I do.” Soon after they became lifelong friends, and Cassatt began to exhibit with the Impressionists. “I had already recognized who were my true masters. I admired Manet, Courbet, and Degas,” she said. “I hated conventional art. I began to live.”
Cassatt also hated social conventions that forbade women from pursuing a profession. Born to a wealthy Pennsylvania family, she left the United States as soon as possible to study art in Europe before settling in Paris. “How wild I am to get to work, my fingers fairly itch,” she said. It wasn’t so simple, however, for Victorian women. Since they were not permitted to be alone with any man except a relation, Cassatt’s only male subjects were her father, brothers, and Degas (she destroyed that canvas). Her trademark images were portraits of mothers with children.
Inspired by Japanese prints, Cassatt adopted — in oil, pastels, and prints — their brightly colored, flat images and sharp designs. A gifted draftsman, like Degas she crisply and precisely outlined her figures and composed tautly calculated designs. Her figures typically dominate the picture space, crammed close to the surface, but are surrounded by expressive space, for Cassatt exploited the visual power of space between objects. She used the Impressionist palette of vivid hues, pale tints, golden light, and shadows tinged with color.
In her mother-and-child pictures (modern icons of maternity like Picasso’s and Henry Moore’s), the figures gesture realistically. In protective poses with faces close together, they touch, caress, and embrace.
Keenly aware of restraints imposed on all women, Cassatt became both a socialist and supporter of women’s suffrage. “After all give me France,” she said. “Women do not have to fight for recognition here if they do serious work.” As Gauguin observed, “Mary Cassatt has charm, but she also has force.”
PRINT COLLECTING
A print is made by creating a design on a hard surface like wood, metal, or stone, which is then inked and pressed against paper to transfer the image. Relief cutting, as in Dürer’s Renaissance woodcuts, was the earliest method for duplicating images. Then Rembrandt achieved subtle effects with drypoint, but until the late 1800s most artists concentrated on one-of-a-kind artworks rather than multiples.
In the 1870s what had been mainly a commercial process for duplicating pictures was revitalized by painter-engravers like Pissarro, Toulouse-Lautrec, Bonnard, and Munch. Before, artists had colored etchings (printed in ink of one color) by hand. When the Impressionists saw Japanese color woodblock prints using inks of different colors, they began applying this technique in drypoint prints (Cassatt) and color lithographs (Lautrec). Color prints became the rage in France in the 1890s, and the limited-edition color print was born. For the most port, the public did not consider prints a collectible artistic endeavor until the 1960s when galleries specializing in prints opened with works created for the medium. A boom in sales, exhibits, and connoisseurship occurred as Contemporary artists tried their hands at over-sized prints that rivaled the scale of canvases, at a fraction of the cost to collectors.
MORISOT. Berthe Morisot (1841-95), the great-grand-daughter of Fragonard, was both intelligent and independent. Early on she rejected her stuffy drawing master to paint out-of-doors with Corot. While copying a