Girl in Blue Armchair

Girl in Blue Armchair
Artist Mary Cassatt
Style Impressionism


In Little Girl in a Blue Armchair, Mary Cassatt demonstrates her powers of observation in showing her young subject sprawled in a large, blue armchair. The smartly dressed little girl fidgets; in the next chair is her sleeping dog. The girl's pose has the naturalism of childhood that would later characterize many of Cassatt's paintings of children.
Mary Cassatt's paintings and graphics depict the world of nineteenth-century women, mothers, and children. Her exploration of intimate domestic life is informed by an unsurpassed ability to capture the natural, sometimes awkward poses of her figures. She avoided appealing to sentimentality by refusing to "prettify" her subjects, instead employing natural expressions and un-idealized models. Little Girl in a Blue Armchair represents the characteristic restless posture of a child in an oversized, adult chair, captured in a composition that is remarkable for its brilliant color and striking design.

Cassatt's strong colors and energetic brushwork mark her connection with the French impressionists. (Impressionism - A movement among late nineteenth-century French painters who sought to present a true representation of light and color. Working primarily outdoors, such artists applied small touches of paint to catch fleeting impressions of the scenes before them. Many American artists adopted the style.)
In style and subject matter, her art is close to that of Degas and Edouard Manet. Degas, in fact, made suggestions about the composition of this painting and reworked parts of its background. In Cassatt's pictures, light does not dissolve form. Instead, objects retain their mass and coherence with light enhancing their physical presence.

In the nineteenth century many artists were experimenting with subjects that formerly had been considered minor or unacceptable. Inspired by the realist imagery of painters Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet, and the writings of Emile Zola and Gustave Flaubert, young artists rejected the conventional idea that serious painting had to illustrate a strong underlying moral or ethical theme. Instead they chose to record the world as they viewed it, depicting their surroundings and contemporary life in the city and countryside. Mary Cassatt's images of women and of children are a part of this broad movement in art and literature to represent aspects of everyday life in the second half of the nineteenth century.

A new approach to painting paralleled this emphasis on contemporary subjects. Academic artists had used a sober palette, with a variety of neutral and dark tones. They applied their paint in carefully blended brushstrokes that resulted in a widely admired, smooth, enamel-like surface. The Impressionists believed that bright color and broad, obvious brushstrokes were more appropriate in conveying the shimmering effects of outdoor light, and in capturing the immediacy of everyday life. Cassatt painted her early Salon submissions in the darker tones of the old masters, but under the influence of the Impressionists, her palette brightened noticeably.

Cassatt painted this canvas shortly after she first came into contact with the Impressionists. In fact, Little Girl in a Blue Armchair may have appeared in the 1879 exhibition under the title Portrait of a Young Girl. The brilliant color and bold, loosely handled brushstrokes are characteristic of her work at this time. Note the confident brushwork in the foreground chairs and in the little girl's outfit. Details of texture are not meticulously defined, but instead are suggested by the rapidly applied brushstrokes. The immediacy suggested by the handling of the surface is accentuated by the novelty of the composition.
Pictorial structure and clarity are the foundation of Cassatt's art. Under Edgar Degas' tutelage, she began to collect and study Japanese prints; their patterns and asymmetric designs greatly influenced her work. Here she placed the girl, the focus of the composition, off-center. The armchairs form a pattern encircling an oddly shaped patch of gray floor in the middle of the picture. As in Japanese art, the forms are tilted up, and the edge of the canvas crops the image. Many artists were influenced by the dramatic non-western perspective, strong colors, and arbitrary cropping found in the inexpensive woodblock prints. The impact of Asian art on nineteenth-century painting is evident in the way part of each chair is deliberately sheared off at the frame.
This painting shows the girl is in her private world with petulant boredom. The unusual perspective may have been influenced by her recent friendship with Degas. The sofas are treated in a painterly blue with pattern, and unlike the Salon, which portrayed children with sweetness; this child is allowed to be herself. Cassatt wrote, "I love to paint children. They are so natural and truthful."

"Viewing Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour" Through Mary Cassatt's Impressionist Lens"

Mary Cassatt, nineteenth-century American Impressionist, combined realistic detail with obvious artistic technique to represent penetrating psychological glimpses into women in domestic interiors; Kate Chopin, nineteenth-century American realist writer, incorporated some of the same representational techniques to narrate "a truly remarkable tale about a subdued wife's vision of living only for herself" (Seyersted 57). Cassatt's treatment of color, space, and gaze in Five O’clock Tea and Little Girl in a Blue Armchair provides a lens for viewing spatial and sensory images in Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour." In picturing female subjects, Cassatt employed impressionist spatial conventions and reversed the male gaze to provide nontraditional impressions of women, much as Chopin employed space and belied the male guess in her "experimental" tale. Thus, Cassatt's constrained colors and spaces make visible the physical and emotional constraints that Louise Mallard suffers in Chopin's "most startling picture of female self-assertion" (Seyersted 111).


http://cache.search.yahoo-ht2.akadns.net/search/cache?ei=UTF-8&p=Girl+in+Blue+Armchair+by+cassatt+point+of+view&y=Search&fr=yfp-t-501&u=wssa.asu.edu/pdf/abstracts/women.html&w=girl+girls+blue+armchair+cassatt+%22points+of+view%22+%22point+of+view%22+pointofview&d=FKZEAS72Q-In&icp=1&.intl=us

http://www.nga.gov/education/schoolarts/cassatt.htm

http://www.nga.gov/collection/gallery/ggcassattptg/ggcassattptg-61102.0.html

Mary Cassatt

Mary Cassatt
American painter
1844-1926


Mary Stevenson Cassatt (May 22, 1844 – June 14, 1926) was an American painter. Born in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, which is now part of Pittsburgh, she was the daughter of a well-do-to businessman. Cassatt grew up in an environment that valued education. Her parents believed travel was a way to learn, and before she was 10 years old, she visited many of the capitals of Europe, including London, Paris, and Berlin. After a few years of life in Paris, the family went back to the USA.
Mary, impressed by all the art she had seen in Europe, surprised her parents by the wish to become an artist. Becoming an artist in the 19th century was as difficult for a woman as becoming a doctor. Society then had a different understanding of the role of women.

Finally Mary won and her parents allowed her to visit the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In 1866 she went back to Paris. She copied the old masters in the Louvre and other museums. The young woman artist had acquired pretty good skills in traditional art style and in 1872 a Mary Cassatt painting was even accepted by the judges of the Salon.

Then she got to know Edgar Degas, an artist from the group of Impressionists who were refused by the Salon and had established their own show, the Salon des Refuses. Edgar Degas introduced her to his friends Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro and other Impressionist rebels.

Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas became good friends. Some art historians think she also was his mistress. This is however rather questionable as Degas was considered a convinced misogynist. Under the influence of Edgar Degas and the other Impressionists the artist Mary Cassatt changed her painting style. She used light colors and began to paint people.

Mary Cassatt's favorite subjects became children and women with children in ordinary scenes. Her paintings express a deep tenderness and her own love for children. But she never had children of her own.

The artist's artistic breakthrough came in 1892, when she received a commission for a mural for the Woman's Building at the Chicago World's Fair. The mural painting got lost after the fair and has not shown up until today.


Her Role in Promoting Impressionism

Mary Cassatt influenced Impressionism not only as an artist. She also had an important role in sponsoring and in financial promotion of Impressionist art. She often bought paintings of her friends when they were short of cash. And with her connections to rich American families, she encouraged many of her countrymen to buy Impressionist art. Quite a few of the great Impressionist art collections in the USA were established as a result of her activities. The collection of 19th century French paintings of the Havemeyers was largely mediated by her. The collection is now in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art.

She died on June 14, 1926 at Château de Beaufresne, near Paris, and was buried in the family vault at Mesnil-Théribus, France. Before 2005, her paintings sold for as much as $2.8 million.

http://www.humanitiesweb.org/human.php?s=g&p=a&a=i&ID=810

http://www.mfa.org/exhibitions/sub.asp?key=15&subkey=629
http://www.renoirinc.com/biography/artists/cassatt.htm

Baudelaire

Charles Pierre Baudelaire was an influential nineteenth century French poet, critic and acclaimed translator. He was called the father of modern criticism, who shocked his contemporaries with his visions of lust and decay. Baudelaire's influence on the direction of modern French (and English) language literature was considerable. Whatever was consider beautiful for society at that time it was considered ugly for him or vise versa. He underscored what society was against. Spiritual, or emotional reality had much more value than anything else for him. He believed that the modern painters or artists should be Flaneur meaning that somebody who spends all his time looking and observing the world all day and all night. In order to do that they need time and money, which means they did not care about any commissions and painted art for art sake. So they needed to be wealthy to search the world around. Another assumption was that going far anywhere in 19th century was completely restricted for women. For example, women could not go to cafés and the only places that they could go where Opera or park with several people. Therefore painters had to be males in a very detached style. Because Baudelair believed that if you are not part of the people who are looking at something, you would be able to see things, that you wouldn’t other wise see if were embedded in it. He also talked about modernity. There are two prerequisites for paintings that are representing modernity. Half of the art should consider fugitive, contingent and ephemeral, meaning that currently, spontaneously happening and transitory. The other half of the art should consider eternal and immutable, meaning that the subject matter should be love, emotion, suffering, grief, fear, lost and anger. All of them are raw feelings they may change over time but always it is going be immutable. So beauty is not eternal it changes all time. For example, Goya’s piece (Saturn devouring his children) is eternal, because it shows suffering and emotion.
He also talked about how artists should use their own imagination. He mentioned lazy artists just copy costumes or other things only from past and from Greco-roman mythology. They are not doing anything new. The real artists should look around the world at the texture or all the details and put it into paintings. Baudelair said it had problem with Ingres paintings. His paintings are all artificial and are not real, in term of costumes, mythology and gestures.

Charles Pierre Baudelaire talked about society. He is talking about many ladies were going to opera looked aristocratic, pretty and gorgeous in many senses. They had beautiful jewelries, well done hair and beautiful dresses. They seem to be looking at the opera but in reality that’s not what they are looking at. They are just looking at distance, that’s all. When you look at her she looks like society, society is definition of beautiful. At first glance you think she lacks nothing else at all. Everything represents the entire element in society. Therefore, she lacks nothing outside, but truly she lacks everything inside. She has no distinction at all. They look beautiful, but if you take a closer look there is nothing there valuable like society.
He also talked about men too. Aristocratic men look artificial too. Barbers created top of his bodies and bottom of his bodies were also created by tailors. So they have been created.
France was not a fashionable country before 1850’s and 1860’s. Paris was a ghettos place, which had no sewerage. It was a place for all immigrants, gypsies and homeless people. So people never wanted to go there because they thought they could have some diseases, so only people could not live anywhere else lived there. Napoleon the third hired Haussmann. Napoleon wanted Paris to be a cosmopolitan city and a good capital. So he asked Haussmann to renovate the Paris. He created and instituted Haussmanization or urbanization. He created contracts for private owners to bring their department store. He made the Paris we all know now. Everything built: cafes operas, parks and bridges. So there was no differentiation between people’s class. Everybody looked the same and they had the same cloths. Because the visual fabric of Paris changed the social fabric changed too. Therefore, Baudelair said look around and capture the new world instead of looking in the past only. There is something so amazingly going on. So individuals and people who lived in Paris at that time, they did not live for themselves, or they did not exist for themselves they lived for pleasure of other’s. Paris became a place for people watching, getting everybody’s attention. All people, prostitutes did not have anything to offer the society. All prostitutes looked pretty and happy. None of them are real or none of them are eternal. If you take a closer look at the bottom of all of them, there is nothing to exist. If you look at their faces there is a joy there as being alive regardless as anything else. That is real and true beauty. That is what Baudelair wanted that all painters of modern art should look in places that they don’t expect at all.
Before 1850’s and 1860’s, if was easy to identify and recognize the person you were looking at. They were all homeless and gypsy people. But now by the way they dressed no longer is recognizable person’s class. Because everything was purchasable it was hard to say what part of society the belonged.
Guy was an artist that Baudelair elevated his habit. Because he looked around the world and he did things in sketches. He used watercolor instead of pencil because it was quick, rapid and spontaneously. He tried to catch a feeling or gesture all the time. So Baudelair liked him because of the way he looked at world. On the other hand Ingres was not creative at all in his paintings.
In Manet’s The Old Musician, all individuals are on the same canvas from all different level of society but they have noting to do with each other and there is no relationship between them at all. It represented of Paris, people lived on the same space with no relationship whatsoever. There is no link between them. It was new kind of social relationship of Paris at that time after Haussmanization.

Edgar Degas

Edgar Degas
French painter & sculptor
1834 - 1917


Degas was born to an aristocratic family, unusually supportive of his desire to paint. Edgar Degas was a French painter and sculptor, whose innovative composition, skillful drawing, and perceptive analysis of movement made him one of the masters of modern art in the late 19th century. Degas is usually classed with the impressionists, and he exhibited with them in seven of the eight impressionist exhibitions. However, his training in classical drafting and his dislike of painting directly from nature produced a style that represented a related alternative to impressionism.
Degas was born into a well-to-do banking family on July 19, 1834, in Paris. He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts under a disciple of the famous French classicist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, where Degas developed the great drawing ability that was to be a salient characteristic of his art. Degas admired Ingres's work and believed, as the great master did, in the primary importance of drawing in the creation of a work of art. During the eighteenth century, much was made of the rivalry between Ingres the draftsman and Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863), who placed greater emphasis on the role of color in painting. Degas was enamored of both artists and acquired their works for his own art collection.
After 1865, under the influence of the budding impressionist movement, he gave up academic subjects to turn to contemporary themes. But, unlike the impressionists, he preferred to work in the studio and was uninterested in the study of natural light that fascinated them. Theatrical subjects attracted him, and most of his works depict racecourses, theaters, cafés, music halls, or boudoirs. Degas was a keen observer of humanity—particularly of women, with whom his work is preoccupied—and in his portraits as well as in his studies of dancers, milliners, and laundresses, he cultivated a complete objectivity, attempting to catch his subjects in poses as natural and spontaneous as those recorded in action photographs.



In the early 1870s the female ballet dancer became his favorite theme. He sketched from a live model in his studio and combined poses into groupings that depicted rehearsal and performance scenes in which dancers on stage, entering the stage, and resting or waiting to perform are shown simultaneously and in counterpoint, often from an oblique angle of vision.
After 1865, under the influence of the budding impressionist movement, he gave up academic subjects to turn to contemporary themes. But, unlike the impressionists, he preferred to work in the studio and was uninterested in the study of natural light that fascinated them. He was attracted by theatrical subjects, and most of his works depict racecourses, theaters, cafés, music halls, or boudoirs.Degas was a keen observer of humanity -- particularly of women, with whom his work is preoccupied -- and in his portraits as well as in his studies of dancers, milliners, and laundresses, he cultivated a complete objectivity, attempting to catch his subjects in poses as natural and spontaneous as those recorded in action photographs.
Famous and revered, Degas died in Paris on 27th September 1917, and is buried in the Cimetière de Montmartre, Paris. He left more than 2,000 oil paintings and pastels, and 150 sculptures, the latter unsurprisingly mostly depicting racehorses and dancers.


http://www.answers.com/topic/edgar-degas?cat=entertainment
http://arthistory.heindorffhus.dk/frame-Degas.htm
http://www.cosmopolis.ch/english/art/65/edgar_degas.htm