Culture Watch
In this issue:
ART:Mary Cassatt was the only American woman to join the ranks of the French Impressionists. Sixty of her works at Washington, D.C.'s National Gallery of Art show her abiding interest in women and the details of their daily lives.
BOOKS:
A 55-year-old postmaster in an English village finds his ideal in
a 41-year-old nanny. "Lamb in Love" is a lyrical ode to
the sudden blooming of romance in hearts grown old with quiet despair.
Author Carrie Brown has produced a quiet and moving classic about
finding love at last.
AND CONSIDER THIS :
The Essential Mel Tormé is a three-CD set of the quintessential
jazz singer; Single Again provides practical advice for divorced
and widowed women; Mary Cassatt: Modern Woman, the handsome
catalogue of the Washington exhibit, looks at the artist in the context
of her times.
Visions of Domesticity
Mary Cassatt
(National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.)
Enveloped in her immediate concerns, a woman in a Mary Cassatt painting
refuses to fix you with a steady gaze. Her eyes are averted; she looks
down or away, wholly absorbed by what she is doing whether it is reading,
doing needlework, holding a child or balancing a saucer as she lifts a
cup of tea to her lips. More often than not, though, she is looking inward,
blotting out her surroundings as she surrenders to private contemplation.
An American, Cassatt (1844-1926)
is inextricably linked to French Impressionism, and Parisians became
accustomed to seeing her works side-by-side with the leading Impressionists
during the last decades of the 19th century. A major exhibition of her
works, some 60 of her paintings and prints is on view in a splendid
exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. through
September 6.
From her earliest years,
Cassatt was determined to be an artist. She was not yet 16 when
she persuaded her well-to-do family to allow
her to study drawing in Philadelphia, and within a few years, the
bold Pennsylvanian left for Europe, a radical step for a young, unmarried
woman. After traveling and painting in Spain and Italy, she eventually
settled in Paris, where the poets and painters who were dragging art out
of the academy soon became her allies. Like them, she admired the Japanese
prints that had become newly popular in France, and her flattened perspectives
and absence of shadows suggest their influence. One of the delights of
the Washington show is a series of exquisite drawings she made that echo
the Japanese style.
Moving easily among
the circle of painters, she became particularly close to Edgar Degas,
and he painted her portrait several times. Relations between the independent
and strong-willed American and the temperamental Frenchman could be vexing,
and Cassatt once told a friend that "Sometimes it made him furious that
he could not find a chink in my armor, and there would be months when we
just could not see each other, and then something I painted would bring
us together again."
It is striking and seemingly
paradoxical that Cassatt, an intelligent and fiercely direct artist, deliberately
chose to depict women who are, unlike Cassatt, shuttered within a world
of domesticity and seemingly uninterested in anything beyond their own
domain or immediate concerns. But this allowed the artist--and the viewer--the
unique privilege of glimpsing a personal, transient moment. Involved in
their daily occupations, her women are enclosed by what they are wearing:
high collars, long sleeves, full skirts. Cassatt takes care to paint with
fine detail the intricately patterned fabric of dresses; the high sheen
of silk, the delicate froth of white lace at the neck or elbow. The painter
is paying attention to what they wear, but not as fashion. She makes us
notice their clothing as a sensual element that intimately reveals
the everyday life.
Cassatt places her women in
protected, nearly claustrophobic spaces. They aren't to be found
strolling along the boulevards of Paris or enjoying the open air of the
French countryside. Almost always they are confined at home, and even when
they are sitting in a garden, the background of trees and flowers press
closely, suffocatingly against them. Her women are quiet; they are isolated
and private. There are no ruddy Renoiresque scenes of frolic and
gaiety, nor Degas- derived vignettes of ballet girls flushed with the fever
of dance and male admiration. In the Washington show are three fine paintings
of women seated in their loges at a theater; they are out in public, but
they are only partly participating as curious onlookers, focused on what
is going on around them. They are watchful but guarded, and indeed, much
like Cassatt herself.
Across the courtyard at the
National Gallery is another superb show : Portraits by Ingres: Image
of an Epoch. It is the first exhibit outside France of
Ingres' portraiture, and his paintings of the fashionable ladies of his
day makes a wonderful counterpoint to Cassatt's work. Compare the two:
his stylish women display themselves in sumptuous attire; showing off their
elegant gowns, jewels and elaborately dressed coiffures. They look straight
at the viewer, as if to say, "regard my resplendence." His women
are posed for the public, conscious of their place and their splendor;
Cassatt's are captured in the quotidian, oblivious of the beholder. Ingres,
who died just two years before the youthful Cassatt went to Europe, was
a brilliant portrayer of what used to be called 'a speaking likeness.'
He renders creamy skin, bright eyes and curving mouth realistically; every
folds of velvet and gleam of satin are almost photographically real. Ingres'
overall surfaces are smooth and cool as porcelain; Cassatt's vibrate with
quick slashes of color.
Without doubt, the best known
works of Cassatt are her paintings of a woman with her arms entwined around
a child. Maternally tender and affectionate, they are scrupulously lacking
in sentimentality or kitsch, and this is largely due to the strength
of her composition. Cassatt had
studied Renaissance Madonna-and-child masterpieces
during her time in Italy, and consciously echoes the formal arrangements.
But it is the woman's hands that give the paintings power and
urgency. These are large hands that give firm, muscular support as
they hold the soft flesh. Not a mother herself, Cassatt saw with unerring
eye the deep bond between a mother and a child, and painted them, just
as she did the women who sit alone, with a remarkable clarity and generosity
that transcends the merely charming to become a vision of contemporary
life.
Hearts Leap with Joy
Lamb in Love by Carrie Brown
(Algonquin Books; 348 pages; $21.95)
A grand English manor house with a handsome, mysterious
American owner. A sheltered solitary woman who lives there as nanny to
his motherless, retarded son. Gossipy villagers. A crude and lusty gardener.
A shy village bachelor. An unanticipated stirring of hearts. Basic elements,
these, for the predictable English romance novel, and it's a brave and
magical writer who can take what could be as trifling as straw and transform
it into precious gold. Such a writer is Carrie Brown. Her first book, Rose's
Garden, received glowing reviews last year, and now she has trumped
its success with a second, luminous novel, Lamb in Love. The writing
dazzles, and when her two central characters aren't breaking your heart
with their longing for love they are lifting you with them to the ecstatic
realm of first, sweetest love.
Most of the story unfolds
through the eyes of Norris Lamb. He is the village postmaster and church
organist in Hursley, south of London, and for the first time in his 55
years, he has been smitten. Completely and hopelessly. On an evening in
1969, when man first walked on the moon, Lamb saw a sight that has since
filled him with joy. He saw Vida Stephens, nearly naked, dancing along
a fountain in the ruined garden of Southend House, where she has spent
half her life caring for the now-grown mute and eternally child-like Manford.
At 41, Vida has seen all her prospects and yearnings shrink to nothingness
and is resigned to being caretaker of an innocent man-child who cannot
understand or even speak to her. "That night," Brown writes, "she
wanted nothing between her skin and the world, nothing, at last, to come
between what she wanted and what, in the end, she would discover she had."
Lamb's adoration of Vida makes
him giddy, and he orchestrates a bizarre courtship. He writes passionate,
unsigned letters that he has postmarked from foreign countries, leaves
her bouquets of flowers and stealthily enters Southend House in the night
to leave a gift in her bedroom. But he's trapped in the house and terrified,
falls asleep inside a closet . Cold and exhausted he creeps away hours
later, and suddenly hope is restored: "As he walks, he looks up and sees
that the moon has come out and bobs along behind him cheerfully like a
toy on a string. As he turns the corner from the lane onto the Romsey Road,
the moon swings round his shoulder as if to light the way, and when Norris
reaches the street, he has to gasp, for there she has laid down a trail
of silver for him to follow, a carpet rolled out for a king."
Poor Vida is distressed
by the strange antics and begins to suspect various men in the village
as the secret suitor. As Lamb's comical attempts to woo her misfire,
the possibility that she might be the object of someone's affection awakens
her as if from a dream. At the same time as she recognizes her deepest
yearnings, Vida also starts to discover her admirer's identity.
Unexpectedly, Manford
becomes the key that finally unlocks both hearts. There is one more moonlit
night between the pair, and on that one, Lamb, whose imagination
has transported Vida to any number of exotic locales, finally sees
her as she is: a kind-hearted sympathetic woman with the gift of loving
purely without expectation or condition. For Vida, Lamb has one last gift,
the freedom finally to choose her heart's desire. Let's just hope we receive
more grand gifts like Lamb in Love from Carrie Brown.
And Consider This:
Music:The Essential Mel Tormé
(Laserlight; $16.97)
He wasn't the sexiest guy on the bandstand
and didn't have the street-tough cool of Sinatra, but when Mel Tormé
sang a standard, you knew it was sung. He was the original smoothy,
with, a slight huskiness to his voice that kept it from being too pretty
and lent him a boyish appeal. His death in June marks the sad ending to
the era of the great crooners. Tormé used to say with justifiable
pride that he never sang a song the same way, and certainly on this three-CD
album he approaches each number on its own merits, effortlessly improvising
with melody and lyrics. There's a glorious array of numbers here, ranging
from Broadway, the movies and such ballads from our younger days as April
in Paris and I'll Be Seeing You. He's backed on some cuts by
a orchestra, and on others by a small group with solo riffs on piano or
guitar.
In decades of recording and performing in
cabaret and super clubs, Tormé was the sunniest of singers. He does
a insouciant, jazz-inflected version of Love Me or Leave Me
as if romance was no more than another fizzy drink, and then on the next
cut, puts a soul-hurting touch on I Hadn't Anyone 'Til You. After
him, we haven't anyone at all.
Books:
Single Again: A Guide for Women Starting Over by Victoria Jaycox
(Norton; 334 pages; $24.95)
Women live longer than men, and that's a fact. Well, hooray for us!.
But for those women who have had long marriages, and suddenly find they
are single, longevity may not always be cause for celebration. Interviewing
women who have been divorced or widowed, activist author Victoria Jaycox
lists ways for the single woman to re-define and re-create herself. Facing
the devastating feeling of being alone and seeing it not as an abyss but
as a challenge is, as Jaycox quotes one divorced woman, "the bravest thing
you've ever done." Brave, but not always easy, and that is why this
practical and compassionate guide was written.
Books:
Mary Cassatt: Modern Woman, Judith A. Barter, editor
(Art Institute of Chicago; 376 pages; $65 hard cover)
Six essays put the artist's perceptive interpretations of domestic life into the context of her life and the art world in which she moved.
Feminists have often regarded her as a conservative because of the subjects
she painted, but as this handsome catalogue to the current exhibit in
Washington makes clear, she was a bold and innovative artist. Her continual
experiments in color and brushwork were attempts to make art that was steeped
in tradition while reflecting contemporary themes. Another important and
overlooked aspect of Cassatt's contribution that is examined here is her
long career as adviser to American collectors. With her reputation established,
Cassatt made it her business to assure that the works of the old masters
as well as her fellow Impressionists crossed the Atlantic. For many reasons,
American art is indebted to Mary Cassatt.
