Spinster Mary

America's greatest woman painter, Mary Cassatt, a spinster famed for her pictures of mothers and children, got her first big U.S. show last week, 15 years after she died in France.

Assembled from museums and private collections all over the U.S. and installed in the Baltimore Museum by the No. 1 Cassatt expert, Adelyn Dohme Breeskin, the show contained 156 of Mary Cassatt's finest oils, pastels, dry points, color prints and drawings, surrounded with side shows of letters, photographs and paintings by such famed Cassatt contemporaries as Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Edouard Manet, Auguste Renoir. For Mary Cassatt, who went to Europe in 1868 to study art, lived there the rest of her long life, an expatriate American, never got full recognition from either France or the U.S.

Just what it was that turned tall, determined Mary Cassatt from the conventional life of a Philadelphia society girl to a career of painting on the Paris boulevards of the 1870s has always been shrouded in a cloud of Victorian propriety. Against the wishes of her banker father, who roared that he would almost rather see her dead than a painter, prim, self-willed Philadelphian Cassatt sailed off to Europe alone at the age of 23, remained there, except for a trip or two, until her death in 1926. Impatient with the conservative French academies where other U.S. students complacently copied the traditions of classicists like David and Ingres, she settled down, with a patient Yankee singleness of purpose, to learn painting by herself in her own individualistic way.

By 1874, her forthright paintings, which had begun to appear in the annual Paris Salons, attracted the attention of Impressionist Edgar Degas, whose delicate, flaky pictures of puff-skirted ballerinas she had always idolized. "I would not have admitted," exclaimed Painter Degas, "that a woman could draw as well as that." Inviting her to join the ranks of the Impressionists who were just then making history by dragging art from its musty museums and studios into the sunlight, Painter Degas gave her some pointers on drawing. The platonic friendship between dapper, ironic Boulevardier Degas and his prim Pennsylvania ward ripened and endured until Degas' death in 1917, became the closest relationship Mary Cassatt ever had with a member of the opposite sex.

A woman of wealth, Painter Cassatt might have let her work as an artist dawdle dilettantishly in the wake of a brilliant social career among the intelligentsia of 19th-Century Paris. Parisian bigwigs like Statesman Georges Clemenceau, Authors Emile Zola and Stephane Mallarme, as well as half the great names of French painting, frequented her Paris studio. U.S. art collectors, like the late Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, sought the assistance of her practiced eye in picking items which later found their way into the greatest U.S. museums. Her fiery championship of her fellow Impressionist painters did much to further French Impressionism's fame in the U.S. art world.

But Mary Cassatt was primarily an artist. She worked daily from 8 in the morning till sunset, refusing to leave her easel until sunlight failed. Her evenings she spent on etchings, prints and drawings. For the 22 years following 1874 she scarcely left her studio. From it came a series of puritanically plain, honest, appealing portraits done with tender, impressionistic brush strokes, nearly all of them variations on the same subject: "Mother & Child."

The last years of her life were tragic. Just before World War I broke out, Painter Cassatt's eyes were dimmed by approaching blindness. Unable to paint, she lived alone in Paris with a faithful Alsatian servant named Mathilde. When war forced Mathilde back to her native Alsace, Mary Cassatt, now a totally blind old woman, faced the rumble of the German guns in solitude. But it took more than guns to cow Mary Cassatt. Hobbling with smoldering inner strength about her country place near Beauvais, supporting her frail husk of a body on a big umbrella, she cursed the war, lived on to curse the peace that followed it, along with her former friend Clemenceau's part in it.

Long after the war was over, Mary Cassatt survived in sightless retirement, talking socialism, shaking her umbrella angrily at the new generation of U.S. expatriates who swarmed the Paris boulevards chattering about James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, cubism and Dadaism. To old-time Expatriate Cassatt, the new crop were "cafe loafers," and their years abroad largely a superficial waste of time. Only once, in a moment of despondency, did crusty, erect, blind but proud Pennsylvanian Cassatt lose her elemental fire. That was during the height of World War I when she remarked to a friend: "After all, woman's vocation in life is to bear children."

In 1926, in her old chateau at Mesnil-Theribus, Mary Cassatt died. During her life she had created children by the hundred. But all of Mary Cassatt's children were on canvas.

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