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The striking thing about art criticism is that it's all revisionist - feminist, Marxist, post-colonial, all intently battering a regime of art critique that's apparently been defunct for at least thirty years. I have nothing against revisionist critique, but I did wish I could find more articles that engaged with the paintings as paintings instead of as socio-cultural-historical artifacts. Surely art is something more than just a mirror of its times?
And even if all Victorian art (I was in a nineteenth-century art class, so that’s what we read articles about) is just a mirror of its times, that isn’t quite the straitjacket people portray it as. Yes, the Victorians produced these happy housewife paintings.
But they also produced the painting below: the sulky, bored child leaning on her mother’s lap. It’s hardly idyllic, and it gives the girl a lot more psychological depth than children often have in art – then, or before then, or now.
The painter here is Mary Cassatt, who has a number of pictures of sulking girls, as in the picture above: Little Girl in a Blue Armchair and Little Girl in a Straw Hat and Pinafore are two other examples. The reoccurrence of the motif is curious, as sulkiness was not considered an acceptably feminine emotion; but Cassatt’s sulky girls are too young to know better.
It’s worth considering whether these pictures show Cassatt’s animus against the system – and I think there’s truth to this; Cassatt did find society’s constraints on her ability to paint irritating.
But that doesn’t mean, I think, that we need to dismiss all Cassatt’s happy mother-and-child paintings (and she painted dozens) as the artist whoring herself out to the marketplace. Condemning these paintings for being acceptable to Victorian sensibilities and for allowing the artist to earn a living is destroying what agency she had; the fact that it was acceptable doesn’t mean it’s false.
And even if all Victorian art (I was in a nineteenth-century art class, so that’s what we read articles about) is just a mirror of its times, that isn’t quite the straitjacket people portray it as. Yes, the Victorians produced these happy housewife paintings.
But they also produced the painting below: the sulky, bored child leaning on her mother’s lap. It’s hardly idyllic, and it gives the girl a lot more psychological depth than children often have in art – then, or before then, or now.
The painter here is Mary Cassatt, who has a number of pictures of sulking girls, as in the picture above: Little Girl in a Blue Armchair and Little Girl in a Straw Hat and Pinafore are two other examples. The reoccurrence of the motif is curious, as sulkiness was not considered an acceptably feminine emotion; but Cassatt’s sulky girls are too young to know better.
It’s worth considering whether these pictures show Cassatt’s animus against the system – and I think there’s truth to this; Cassatt did find society’s constraints on her ability to paint irritating.
But that doesn’t mean, I think, that we need to dismiss all Cassatt’s happy mother-and-child paintings (and she painted dozens) as the artist whoring herself out to the marketplace. Condemning these paintings for being acceptable to Victorian sensibilities and for allowing the artist to earn a living is destroying what agency she had; the fact that it was acceptable doesn’t mean it’s false.
