Mary Cassatt, Little Girl in a Blue Armchair

0:04Dr. Steven Zucker: We're in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., looking at Mary Cassatt's Little Girl in a Blue Armchair. This is a magnet in this gallery. People are drawn to this painting, and I think it's because it's so expressive of a human feeling that children express but adults try not to. Dr. Beth Harris: This is a really interesting gallery that's filled with the work of other Impressionists.

0:29We see Monet's portrait of his son in a cradle and portraits of women by Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas and these scenes from modern life that are really typical of Impressionism. But this one really stands out. Dr. Steven Zucker: The girl sits on the chair, but with a kind of almost defiance in her exhaustion. Dr. Beth Harris: She does seem to have flung herself down on this large chair that emphasizes her childhood, her smallness. Dr. Steven Zucker: But she's actually quite large in this canvas. Her left toe seems to almost be trying to touch the frame of the painting, and the bow in her hair reaches very close to the top of the canvas. And so she's occupying quite a bit of space. So we're close to her, and it also suggests our vantage point,

1:21which is quite low. We're at a child's level looking across at her. Dr. Beth Harris: I'm not really sure that we're at a very precise point in space because in some ways I feel like I look down at her, and in some ways I look across from her, and in some ways I feel like I look down at that carpet. And she forms this very strong diagonal line on one side of the canvas. It's very asymmetrical. We have this empty space on the left, this voluminous figure and chair on the right, and this tension between the surface pattern and the three-dimensionality of her body.

2:00Dr. Steven Zucker: Well, you see this tension between flatness and volume everywhere. There is, as you said, that wonderful pattern that is part of the fabric of these chairs. You see the wonderful pattern of the tartan that she wears across her midsection and that is gathered up behind her shoulders and then in the bow in her hair as well.

2:18Dr. Beth Harris: And in her socks too. Dr. Steven Zucker: Oh, right, and in the socks. But that's then all placed against a ground plane that on one hand does recede into space because the light from the window in the back of the room is illuminating the floor just a little bit. But at the same time, that floor becomes almost an abstract negative space that is absolutely flat and reminds us of the two-dimensionality of this canvas. And so there really is this play between two and three dimensions. Dr. Beth Harris: And I think that the ambiguity of the space and our place within it is clear if we look at the carpet or that gray floor on the right side of the chair where it almost seems to come in front of the edge of

3:00the chair. And what is so shocking to me is the looseness of the brush strokes all over the blue pattern of the four chairs here. All of these quick squiggly lines of paint and I think, how did she decide it was done? Clearly what she was going for was this spontaneity, was this rapidity, was this sense of a ephemeral moment and not to have it look finished and careful. Dr. Steven Zucker: I think that's especially effective in the way in which Cassatt has handled the lace that she wears because it seems as if that lace is still in motion from the child having flopped down, that nothing yet is fixed, that she's not yet at rest. Dr. Beth Harris: The patterning speaks to me as does her dress and the neatness of her bangs of the

3:47adult grown-up world who's dressed her up and gave her a kind of rigidity. And the patterns are all regular and she is this irregularity. She's just had it with the grown-up world. Dr. Steven Zucker: Well, she doesn't fit. The chair is too big. Her feet don't reach down to the floor. They're not even close. But for me, there's something else.

4:10She seems to be looking over at the dog and the dog is asleep and the dog is content in a way that she is not. And she seems almost a little jealous that the dog can be at peace and she's not. She's not comfortable. She's not happy. Dr. Beth Harris: Yeah, I'm not really clear that she's looking at the dog.

4:29She could be, but she also could just not be. And Cassatt is offering these two figures to us for contemplation. But the dog, it's true, he didn't have to wear a bow. He doesn't have to wear a dress. He doesn't have to wear fancy Mary Janes. He doesn't have to wear lace that you can't get dirty.

4:47He's unencumbered by the expectations of respectability of a kind of upper bourgeois class that Mary Cassatt belonged to. Dr. Steven Zucker: It's so interesting the way that the furniture stands in for the adult presence. The chair and the couch, especially in the background, seem almost as if they are an adult presence. Dr. Beth Harris: I admit I'm just flabbergasted by some of the decisions that she made. Look at the girl's right shoe and sock and how unfinished the paint around that shoe looks.

5:22She didn't choose to resolve that at all, but there are some areas that are much more resolved like her right knee, for example, and calf. It's just so interesting the way she decided, okay, this is done. And the blues and the shadows and greens and pinks in her flesh really confounding the expectations of a salon goer or of an exhibition goer in Paris in the 1870s.

5:48This looked like it was modern life. It looked modern in the way it was painted and in its subject matter. Dr. Steven Zucker: One of the things that makes, I think, that modernity stand out is the composition's asymmetry. The child is not in the center. This is almost a snapshot.

6:04This is a fragment of time. If we stand close to this and just look at these marks of pink and green and reds and whites, we're seeing squiggles. We're seeing gestural marks. We're seeing a kind of pure abstraction on a field of blue. The furniture and its volumes vanish. Dr. Beth Harris: It seems pretty clear to me that Cassatt, like so many other artists in the Impressionist circle, is looking at Velázquez, at this quickness of brushstroke that can give a feeling of light and of the everyday and capturing something in motion. Dr. Steven Zucker: But they're also looking at Japanese prints, which are helping to undo the linear perspective that had constructed space in the Western tradition for so long,

6:48and is giving license, in a sense, to create these tensions between volume and flatness, between space and two-dimensionality. Dr. Beth Harris: And what we're looking at is the work of a woman artist whose realm was primarily domestic spaces. And so with many of the male Impressionist artists, we're looking at bars and cafes and the opera, but here, a child inside a fancy bourgeois drawing room.

7:15Dr. Steven Zucker: Not just a child, I would say a modern child.