Original subtitles

Merrick Asat is only one of a handful of women artists up to the beginning of the 20th century

who've managed to forge strong reputations in the male-dominated saga of art history.

She was an American by birth, but lived in France for 60 years

and helped to develop the first great movement in modern art, Impressionism.

Her background was privileged, but her interest in depicting modern life

and her openness to the techniques and ideas of radical artists

was immense.

Merrick Asat was born in May 1843 in Allegheny City,

just across the river from Pittsburgh.

Her father was a wealthy banker who became the city's mayor shortly after Mary's birth.

The Asat family occupied two social worlds,

that of the old colonial American aristocracy

and the new entrepreneurial capitalist society

that was emerging with the industrialised nation.

And consequently, Mary was socially confident, financially comfortable

and culturally aware from an early age.

In 1849, the Asat family moved here to Philadelphia,

the American city that would be most closely associated with Mary Asat.

And over the next few years, a pattern was established

that would determine the nature of the rest of her life.

Because within two years, the family had to travel to Europe,

mainly because Robert, Mary's brother, was very ill.

They spent time in Paris, and then in Heidelberg and Darmstadt,

where the 13-year-old boy finally died.

And then the family came back to Philadelphia.

And in this cultivated city, that at the time was the second largest in the United States,

Mary began to discover what it was she wanted to be.

Cassatt seems to have made the decision that she wanted to be an artist

when she was just 15, and a year later, in 1860,

she enrolled in the illustrious Pennsylvania Academy for Fine Arts,

America's first art school and museum.

It was only over the previous century in Europe

that women had even begun to be allowed to become members of art academies,

and by no means all.

And in certain respects, the Pennsylvanian Academy was an enlightened institution,

which offered its numerous female students the same education that its male ones received,

drawing from casts and copying old masters, as well as working with models.

Cassatt, though, was disparaging,

complaining that she spent too much time drawing animals, cows, she claimed.

In addition, although her basic training was adequate,

women students still faced a local art world

whose museums, dealers and collectors expected women to be society portraitists at best.

In 1865, with the American Civil War still raging,

Cassatt made the inevitable decision to come to Europe to study more seriously as an artist.

And so, even though her father was very much against it,

together with her mother,

she set sail on what effectively was an artistic grand tour,

and her first stop was here in Paris.

Now, she later said that Paris was the kind of place

that a woman could do serious work and be recognised for it,

although it's worth reminding ourselves

that an artist supposedly as radical as Renoir

was soon to say that women lawyers and professors were like five-legged calves,

but that women artists were merely ridiculous.

Now, the place she should have come to was this,

the Ecole des Beaux-Arts,

the most illustrious art school in Paris,

and therefore one of the great art schools of the world.

But, of course, it was men only.

So, instead, she approached one of the newly appointed professors,

a man called Jean-Léon Jérôme,

and became his pupil on a one-to-one basis in his studio.

But her real place of learning

was just a few hundred metres down the way over the river.

Here, in the greatest museum in the world, the Louvre,

Cassatt joined the ranks of eager young artists

who scurried around with sketchbooks or set up their easels

in order to study the phenomenal collections there.

For the Louvre was just one illustrious part of the Parisian art world.

The place where reputations were made or broken

was the annual state-supported salon,

a showcase for contemporary art,

which increasingly formed an international centre

for artists, dealers and collectors.

Cassatt exhibited this picture,

the mandolin player, at the salon in 1868.

It's a touching, slightly sentimental, but direct image

of a peasant girl making music.

And it seems to have been deemed above average by the jury,

who hung it at eyeline on the walls,

which were otherwise filled from floor to ceiling.

Fired up by her modest success,

Cassatt submitted once again a year later,

but was rejected and told her friends she felt humiliated.

After a brief visit to Rome with her mother,

the Franco-Prussian War forced Cassatt back home in 1870.

After a few months back in America,

of course, Cassatt wants to travel back to Europe,

where things have calmed down,

but her parents are very reluctant to let her go,

so much so that they won't give her funding.

However, she decides to find her own means of funding the trip,

so she goes to Pittsburgh,

where she has a meeting with the Catholic bishop there,

and he commissions her to make some copies

for the cathedral in Pittsburgh

of work by an Italian mannerist master called Correggio.

And these works are in the Italian city of Parma,

and with this commission, that's where she goes,

the beginnings of another big extensive trip around Europe.

And she spends about eight months in the city,

and she makes these copies, she earns her money,

and then she starts to explore the art

of the Italian 17th and 18th century,

which starts to inform her own paintings,

of which this is perhaps the best example.

Now, it's quite interesting, because there's a dilemma,

even in her family, about her painting.

They want her to be a portrait painter.

That's more respectable.

She wants to paint broader, bigger pictures.

And in this work, she uses a portrait format

to produce an image called the Baccante,

which has classical undertones,

and it's a picture of a woman

who is one of the followers of Bacchus,

the god of wine and frenzy and celebration.

And these women make noises.

They cut animals up.

They party.

They drink.

And it's as if she's working her way

through aspects of European art history,

with a little nod to Correggio,

who painted Bacchanalian subjects

and began, really, this marked contrast

of light and dark in European painting.

There's also something of the experimentalist here, though,

in early cassatt,

because she has this rather brutal crop on the arm,

which, if you look close to it,

you can see it was intended.

You can see where the painting ends

and the canvas, or the primed canvas, begins.

But what you, I think, get from this painting most strongly

is not just an artist who's searching for her own style,

but in a rather quiet, subtle way,

she's trying to make her own noise.

Cassatt returned to Paris,

renting a studio at 19 Rue Laval,

and began to move away from the European old masters

towards the radical young masters of her own day.

The story goes that Cassatt was wandering up the boulevard Haussmann,

looking at the art in the gallery windows,

when her eye was caught by a series of vivid, fluid pastels.

It changed my life, she later wrote.

I saw art then as I wanted to see it.

Because this was the work of Edgar Degas,

one of the leading lights in the first radical movement in modern art,

known as Impressionism.

Impressionism had come to public prominence in 1874,

when a painting by Claude Monet called Impression Sunrise

had been ridiculed by French critics.

Their subject matter was modern life,

train stations, streets, people at play,

and their techniques were experimental,

trying to capture the fleeting sensations of light.

Equally crucial for Cassatt

was the fact that they'd been regularly rejected from the salons,

so much so that they'd set up their own exhibitions.

Cassatt's desire to be involved in the Impressionist movement

is growingly evident in this painting,

called prosaically but accurately,

Little Girl in a Blue Armchair.

When you look at it, first of all,

you're struck by the increasing bravura

and looseness of the brushstrokes,

particularly those that define the armchair.

And there's something quite brave about Cassatt's decision

to paint the little girl with a tartan rug and a cushion behind her

against this rather busy backdrop.

But it gives the surface a real sense of animation.

However, rather than just have the compressed

and slightly claustrophobic structure or format

that Cassatt's favoured to this point in her career,

she opens up the space,

so the chairs take our eyes on a kind of cyclical motion

around the surface of the canvas.

And the background, she was helped by Degas,

not least in the grey areas here,

but also in painting the light

that streams through the windows in the back.

Perhaps Cassatt let him do so

because she needed to be part of the Impressionist milieu,

but it also shows a generosity of spirit

that you might not always find in male artists with big egos.

But actually, all the energy and sophistication comes from Cassatt.

The crucial point, though, of this painting

is its mood and its subject matter.

There's a lovely, gentle humour in the painting,

not least with the dog, which is a Belgian griffon.

And Cassatt had these dogs

ever since she discovered them in 1873 in Brussels.

They remained with her throughout her life.

But there's something slightly comical about the dog

whose eye just seems to be opening

as it sits on the armchair next to the little girl.

And in a way, there's a kind of pictorial rhythm there.

It's a balance in a painting that is otherwise asymmetrical.

She's off-centre.

But, of course, the key figure is the girl.

Now, there's no such thing as an accident in painting.

The crucial point is why or how we choose to interpret

what the painter gives us.

If this were by a male artist,

that pose with the girl fully frontal,

legs slightly apart,

would be seen as very provocative.

With Cassatt, I'm not so sure, though.

I think she's looking at something rather different.

Look at the pose of the child, slumped in this armchair.

She's comfortable.

You can see that from the background.

She's comfortable in every sense.

She's a bourgeois kid.

But that's the key point, I think.

Rather than, as in a lot of paintings of children,

showing them as slightly sentimentalised or cutesy,

or as little ladies on the verge of becoming adults,

what Cassatt is focusing on is entirely natural.

It's that slightly languid boredom that kids have.

And in a way, it makes the image more universal.

Cassatt was now in her early 30s,

childless and partly forced to be a child again

when her parents and sister arrived in Paris,

effectively forcing her to give up her studio alone

and live with the family.

But the family was also to inspire her art,

featuring in her scenes of daily life from the period,

such as this picture, Reading Le Figaro,

which is a portrait of her mother, Catherine.

It's a contemporary image of an intellectually astute

and well-informed woman,

rather than the more traditional images of motherhood.

Stylistically, the work is looser and lighter in touch,

a symphony of different shades of white,

and it clearly shows Cassatt moving increasingly

towards Impressionism.

So much so, that a year later, in 1879,

Cassatt cemented a creative relationship with the group

by accepting their invitation to show

at the 4th Annual Impressionist Exhibition,

held on the first floor of No. 28, Avenue de l'Opera.

One of the works that Cassatt showed

in the 4th Impressionist Exhibition was this one,

Woman with a Pearl Necklace in a Loge or Box,

at the theatre.

In fact, it's her sister, Lydia.

And what we have is a view of contemporary Paris.

More than a million people every month

went to the theatre in the city.

So Cassatt is painting modern life,

as the Impressionists were doing.

But also, she's doing some other things.

Look at the figure of the woman,

illuminated by the top left-hand corner

in a halo of artificial light

that casts challenging shadows

on the woman's face and her body.

She's also wearing this pretty pink frock

that both reveals her body and disguises it.

And the painting, in some ways,

is about what we see

and also what we don't see.

The woman is looking at a show

and we're looking at her.

She's observing a spectacle,

but she is the spectacle as well.

It's also a work that is painted

with visceral, expressionistic brushstrokes.

We see Cassatt pushing at the technique of painting.

But it has this other spatial twist,

which is the mirror in the background,

because we're aware of the theatre

and what is happening because of this mirror.

What Cassatt is doing is taking a device

that other Impressionists, Renoir, Degas, have used

as a means of making more space in the painting.

It's a way of extending the sense of space.

But she does something rather subtle.

Rather than have it parallel with the picture plane,

where you would see her reflection

almost directly behind her,

and actually by implication,

the painter or the spectator

would wonder why they were not in the picture,

she angles the mirror

so we can see the reflection here

on the left of the painting.

And by doing that,

she starts to make us much more aware

of this whole idea of representation,

that painting is on one level

a mirror of the world,

and in this case,

a mirror of modern Parisian life,

evening life, night life.

But at the same time,

she makes us aware of its artificiality too.

Now the critical response to this work

was very good.

People wrote of the exquisite symphonies of colour

that you saw in Cassatt's work.

But she did receive some harsher criticism,

an American, ironically,

who said that it looked like a woman

far gone with jaundice

wrestling with her fan in a box at the theatre,

and that it was part of a movement

or a new school that he had no comprehension of.

Now in a way, that's good for Cassatt,

because she's bloodied with the other Impressionists,

who had also been savagely criticised.

But perhaps most important to her,

her father's response.

Reluctant to begin with, if you remember,

but he says she's now known to the art world.

Also, two other characteristics emerge.

The first is, she starts to work in series

or to explore the subject matter

from a number of different viewpoints.

In fact, the subject matter of in the Lowe's

or in the theatre box

is something that she picks up after this.

Secondly, she starts to experiment technically

much more with the process of painting

and of mark-making.

The Impressionists, of which Cassatt was now very much a part,

were also interested in exploring

the outside life of the city.

And in this painting,

Cassatt makes a rare foray into that territory.

It shows a mother and child

going out for an afternoon drive

in the Bois de Boulogne,

a small forest,

but effectively the wildest public park

or space in the city.

Once again, the woman is her sister, Lydia,

together with Degas' niece, Odile,

and the family pony, Bouchette,

recently acquired by her ageing and infirm parents

to pull their trap around Paris.

The work contrasts the stiffness of the figures

with the sense of motion sweeping through the painting

from right to left,

a dynamic contemporary image

with a certain humour evident

in the almost caricature-like groom

staring off in the opposite direction.

Although Cassatt was now initiated

into this new radical world of the Impressionists,

she was still limited in many respects.

Without breaking major taboos,

it was difficult for a respectable woman

to be fully involved in the public life

of the café and the boulevard.

And more poignantly,

Cassatt's work was severely interrupted

by the care she had to give to her family.

Her mother suffered regularly from illness,

and worse, in November 1882,

her sister Lydia died.

Cassatt was devastated

and didn't exhibit again

until the final Impressionist exhibition of 1886.

The end of Impressionism proved to be no hindrance to Cassatt,

who embarked on perhaps the most fruitful period of her career

as she began to experiment with the process of printmaking.

She seems to have been initially inspired

by a vast exhibition at the Beaux-Arts in Paris

of 725 Japanese woodcut prints

by Utamaro, Horishiga and others.

You must not miss that,

she writes to her friend Burt Morisot, the painter.

I dream of it

and I don't think of anything else but colour on copper.

Still restricted domestically by her ailing parents,

Cassatt began an ongoing series of domestic life,

of women bathing,

combing their hair,

of tea parties,

conversations,

letter writing

and motherhood.

Some have said these are uneventful images,

the daily routines of an upper-class woman,

but they tell a gentle story

from a perspective rarely seen in the history of art,

that of a woman artist,

and technically they show considerable invention and complexity,

with Cassatt fusing the two traditional methods

of aquatint and drypoint etching.

In turn, the prints also fuelled Cassatt's paintings,

not least an extraordinary mural that she produced

for the World Fair held in Chicago in 1893,

when she was asked to paint a 12-by-58-foot epic

depicting modern woman.

Cassatt's mural, sadly no longer in existence,

has been described as the most important work

by a woman artist in the 19th century.

It sought to show how women had risen

from their original condition of servitude.

At the centre of Cassatt's panel

was the subject of a young woman

plucking the fruit of knowledge and science,

a subversion of Eve in the Garden of Eden,

an area that Cassatt also dealt with in her prints.

It was a highly ambitious project

at a time when the few women artists who had any profile

were still encouraged to stick to pastels,

portraits and miniatures.

Not surprisingly, perhaps,

the work was savagely criticised

by the male cultural establishment,

but its example inspired numerous women

over the next few decades.

Having completed a mural to the modern woman,

Cassatt then went on holiday

to the south of France, to Antibes,

where she produced a series of works

of which this is far and away the most striking.

It's called The Boating Party

and pays distant but direct homage

to a work produced by Manet

that was shown at the 1879 Salon

and that Cassatt subsequently helped

be acquired by an American collector,

and she described it as the last word in painting.

Nonetheless, she decides to try and produce a postscript,

which in a way is an evolution of Manet's art

and of Impressionism more broadly.

That flickering quality where sunlight dances on water

is still evident in Cassatt's work,

but details are pared down,

and what we have is this bold, striking composition.

In order to paint this,

Cassatt, who was notoriously a sufferer of seasickness,

staged everything on the shore.

She went out to sea to make sketches

of the effects of water,

but was so chronically ill

that she hired the boat,

put it on the sand

so the sea was in the background

and would frame the heads

and the silhouettes of the figures.

And then she hired three models.

Even though this looks like a family,

they're just hired models

of the man here wearing the costume

of a Provencal fisherman.

And having staged the scene,

what she produces

is an extraordinary taut

and sophisticated formal composition.

The composition is quite strongly cropped

with the horizon line

and just an inch or so of sky visible at the top.

And you get this amazing sense

of horizontal layering

through the boat,

to the sea,

to the shore,

to the sky.

But the real tension here

is in the foreground,

where it's as if,

as you stand in front of this work,

you're actually in the boat itself.

It's an intimate painting

that draws you into the scene.

Then, almost rebuffing the viewer,

is the man who pulls away

from the woman in the painting

and out towards the viewer.

But to give that kind of tautness,

Cassatt then has the sail

being pulled in the other way.

OK, so you get this push-and-pull motion.

And all the lines,

from the arabesque curves of the boat,

to the oar,

to the man's hand,

point inwards.

And that's amplified

by the way the light

casts this almost arrow-like form

on the child's face.

And this whole central area

becomes compelling.

There's a tension

between the figures

as they look at each other.

And people have speculated

on whether or not

this was the father

or meant to be the father

or whether it was just

a hired boatman.

But ultimately, I think,

what's really important

about the painting

is that Cassatt

has this controlled,

sophisticated

and bold vision.

And the work announces the fact

that she's reached

some kind of artistic maturity.

Cassatt's father had died in 1891.

And although she was devastated,

his death did give her

a newfound sense of freedom.

And for the first time

in her life,

she was able to buy

her own house.

Here, the beautiful

chateau of Beaufren,

where she'd stayed

some as previously.

And she'd put models

in boats on the little lake

and started to paint

around the mill.

And increasingly,

she became enchanted

with both the gardens

and the house

in what became

a large studio

in the outdoors.

But inevitably for Cassatt,

there were limitations

on her freedom,

not least her ailing mother.

Nonetheless,

she was able to move

with some degree of ease

between the hustle

and bustle of Paris,

90 kilometres away,

and this tranquil

country retreat.

If it was the death

of her father

that had initiated

a newfound sense

of freedom for Cassatt,

the death of her mother

in 1895

triggered her last

great creative phase.

Perhaps in homage

to her own mother,

Cassatt explored

more intently than ever

the subject

of mother and child.

It's one of the most

prominent themes

in art history,

usually a depiction

of the Virgin Mary

and her infant son.

But Cassatt

paints tender,

caring images

of modern mothers

feeding, bathing

and reading

to their children.

In a way,

they're yearnful pictures.

Cassatt never had

any children of her own

and proclaimed

on more than one occasion

that she was married

to her art.

Soon after,

with the outbreak

of World War I,

Cassatt was forced

to head south,

to grass,

but she soon came back

here to Beauforten.

And for the last

ten years of her life,

she had a studio

and a print room

here in the mill.

But sadly,

she spent more time

taking joy in the garden

because her eyesight

was failing

and she had chronic cataracts.

And then,

on the 14th of June,

1926,

at the ripe old age

of 83,

Mary Cassatt died.

A highly successful artist

financially in her lifetime,

but one who in her later years

thought perhaps

she may have sold out

too much to the market.

It's quite easy

to overstate

the case with Cassatt.

She was,

after all,

a fringe member,

if an accomplished one,

of the most radical art movement

of the last 200 years,

Impressionism.

But now,

80 years or so

after her death,

with the dust settling,

I think two things emerge.

One,

she's a very important,

early,

great American artist,

helping to build up

a cultural momentum

whose impact

is still evident today.

And secondly,

and perhaps most crucially,

even though she hated

to be called

or labelled

a woman artist.

She's a pioneering woman figure,

one of a handful

of women artists

before the 20th century

whose reputations

were strong.

And now,

at the beginning

of a new century,

when women are

at least the equal,

if not perhaps stronger

than men,

as a kind of force

in the visual arts,

the example of Mary Cassatt

seems highly significant.