Mary Cassatt e Berthe Morisot sono due artiste del XIX
secolo. La ‘festa della mamma’ che ricorre il tredici maggio è
un’occasione per ricordarle, in quanto spesso soggetti delle loro opere sono maternità.
(RR)
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| Mary Cassatt, Madre e figlia |
Mother's Day
will have come and gone, but the love of a mother, engraved on copper as well
as on the heart, never fades. Nor will
fade the artistic treasure left to the world over a century ago by two
Impressionists whose names remain too little known, as opposed to those of
their illustrious fellows, Monet, Manet, Renoir and Degas. The French-born Morisot (1841-1895) had been showing
with them from the get-go. Cassatt
(1844-1926), an American painter and printmaker from Pennsylvania, joined the
so-called Indépendants in 1877. The
entire group became the Impressionists, although as of 1886, Cassatt no longer
identified with any one movement. Both Cassatt
and Morisot had known from an early age that they wanted to paint for a living,
and so they studied art as extensively as they could in their day. Both were blessed with educated, cultured
mothers who were in a position to support their dreams. Thus, against all odds, Cassatt and Morisot ended
up working diligently all their lives, with not a dab less talent than the
other Impressionists. Only, their given
names were not Claude or Edouard or Pierre-Auguste or Edgar: They were Mary and Berthe, and that made all
the difference. Unlike Berthe Morisot, at
least Mary Cassatt was able to attend an art school, the Pennsylvania Academy
of Fine Arts in Philadelphia; however, she was not permitted to participate in
drawing classes featuring live models, and her male teachers and fellow
students were merely patronizing. In
France, meanwhile, no women at all were admitted to the Academie des Beaux-Arts
in Paris until 1897, when only ten were permitted to study separately from the
men. Berthe Morisot had such talent, in
any event, that even without being eligible to attend the Academie des
Beaux-Arts, she began showing at their annual Salon de Paris at the age of 23
and continued to do so for ten years!
Then she joined the Impressionists and married Manet's supportive brother,
Eugene. Berthe and Eugene had a daughter,
Julie (1878-1966), herself interested in art, who appeared in paintings by her
uncle
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| Berthe Morisot - Le bercea |
(Manet), Renoir, and Berthe.
Berthe's sister, Edma, also had talent but found herself in a more
restrictive marriage and renounced painting to her own and Berthe's
dismay. Berthe once said, summing up
every woman's problem, "I don't think there's ever been a man who treated
a woman as an equal and that's all I would have asked, for I know I'm worth as
much as they." The two women,
Cassatt and Morisot, were on good terms. They understood each other perfectly, and also
happened to avoid the same subjects, urban and street scenes as well as the
adult nude. Instead, they painted extraordinarily
gentle portraits and domestic scenes, with Morisot also tending toward
landscape. Both captured female subjects
of all ages, children, infants in arms.
Said Cassatt, who never married or had children of her own, "I love
to paint children. They are so natural
and truthful. They have no arrière pensée." Morisot, one of whose best known works is
"The Cradle" (1872) simply observed, "The best and most
beautiful things in this universe cannot be seen or even heard, but must be
felt with an open heart." Of
Morisot's work, Nicole Myers of the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU has said,
"With her light palette, feathery brushstrokes, and quiet sense of female
domesticity, she was considered by many critics of the time as the purest and
most successful of the Impressionists."
Cassatt's color engravings, inspired to some degree by her love of
Japanese prints, featured the same subjects as her paintings. More often than not, especially from 1900
onwards, they pictured the tenderest Mother-and-Children scenes on earth. Cassatt scholar, Adelyn Breeskin, has said
that Cassatt's prints "now stand
as her most original contribution . . .
adding a new chapter to the history of graphic arts . . . technically, as color
prints, they have never been surpassed."
Given the enormous talent that Cassatt and Morisot both possessed, and the
fact that they were both bonafide Impressionists, how is it possible that their
names have not become household words along with those of their colleagues? I do hope that everyone who reads this post will
check out their work and try to remember their names. With or without "Mary" and
"Berthe". It makes no
difference. A rose is a rose is a rose. UN’AMERICANA A VENEZIA
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