Mary Cassatt: The Impressionist Who Painted The Mind

I always learn so much from Evan Puschak’s videos about art. In this one, he takes a look at the work of Mary Cassatt, who, unlike many of her male peers, used the flattened perspective of Impressionism to reveal the thoughts and feelings of her subjects.

Like Manet, she’s dispensing with traditional modeling and perspective. In fact, her choice of a mirror as background is a brilliant way to literally and figuratively foreground the deceptive nature of perspective. Like Degas, she’s exploring the changing effects of artificial light on flesh and fabric. And she’s experimenting with off-kilter viewing angles.

But Cassat isn’t just adopting these techniques for the sake of it. She’s putting them to work in service of her deeper interest in psychology. She realizes that by not allowing the viewer to get drawn into the narrative space opened up by perspective, this new style of painting actually makes it possible to depict the subtle psychology of everyday life, a psychology uncontaminated by allegory or sentimentality. The trick was to combine the immediacy of Manet’s methods with a meticulous observation of posture, gesture, expression, and activity.

• art
• art school
• Evan Puschak
• Mary Cassatt
• video