Art: BEST U.S. WOMAN PAINTER

NEXT week the Wichita Art Museum will show off a new acquisition that any museum in the world would be proud of: the Mary Cassatt painting opposite. The picture lends great distinction to a collection only 14 years in the making. Using the half-million-dollar estate willed by the widow of a local newspaper publisher, Roland P. Murdock, the museum has already bought 113 works of American art. The Cassatt is the best of this year’s seven purchases.

“Woman’s vocation in life,” said Painter Cassatt once, “is to bear children.” She produced hundreds of children, but they were all on canvas. The daughter of a rich Philadelphia banker, Mary Cassatt embarked for Paris in 1868, when she was only 23. She spent the rest of her long life abroad, in obdurate and unremitting labor at the easel, and made herself the best female painter America has produced. She stayed a spinster all her life, but her favorite theme was that of mother and child. Without sentimentalizing the mother-child relationship, she pictured it clear, and each time new, in its innumerable facets.

The Wichita canvas owes much to Edgar Degas, the woman-hating perfectionist who was Mary Cassatt’s closest male friend. “I would not have admitted,” he exclaimed when first he saw her work, “that a woman could draw as well as that.” He proceeded to teach her a good deal of his own almost cruelly precise draftsmanship, which has never been surpassed for subtlety. Other impressionists—Manet, Monet et al. —followed Degas’ lead in drawing Painter Cassatt into their sunlit circle. From them she got the habit of subordinating form, space and texture to the pure play of light, and of giving her pictures a modest, if contrived, sketchiness.

Mary Cassatt’s most telling device was her own: she painted plain and sometimes charmless people in classically noble poses, and with the same care that earlier artists lavished on saints and goddesses. Coolheaded and warmhearted, easy and austere, her art had the perfect balance that only will power achieves. Beyond that, Painter Cassatt was blessed with psychological penetration as unwelcome in the Victorian age as it is prized today. In the picture opposite, the baby’s burgeoning life subsides to bedtime weariness. Relaxed and perfectly possessive, the child clasps its mother’s chin. The mother is peaceful too, but stiff in her tight bodice, and careful to hold her baby securely until it sleeps.