These days, when you walk through the wonderful selection of Impressionist paintings in the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., you are bound to notice a dozen or so works by Mary Cassatt. I say a dozen, but you will end up thinking there is a good hundred of them. They will jump at you from behind a striking view of Paris captured by Pissarro or they will glare at you from under the newspaper of Cézanne's father or they will, in all honesty, bring you back to earth after the beautiful reverie of staring at Woman with a Parasol.
I think there is an elephant in the room here, and the elephant is done with crude brush strokes: Mary Cassatt's paintings are simply not that good.
The most offensive thing about them is that they look like copies, not original works. Degas is all over these paintings, but, really, they are influenced by any number of Impressionists. They are not second-rate as the technique is there and the colours have that rough, rich quality to them. Rather, I would argue that Mary Cassatt's works look second-hand. They look like someone had already done that particular scene, and done it better.
Besides, it is hard to look past those faces. The two ladies from The Loge (1882) are off. There is no mystery about the eyes, no personality to the facial features. They look plain, and that is one crime Impressionist artists could never commit. I am almost reminded of a scene from The Man Who Wasn't There where a piano teacher has this to say about the playing of a young and promising girl: "She plays too polite". Which is also true for Mary Cassatt. She painted too polite, too safe, and at times it feels that the best her paintings could amount to was a faithful homage. After all, Monet's "The Artist's Garden at Vétheuil" is hanging right across the room.
Now obviously there is another elephant in the room here, and this elephant is even bigger and it has to do with why Mary Cassatt is there in the first place, on those huge white walls, alongside Renoirs and van Goghs and Sisleys. But this elephant I would rather not touch, or it might explode into a million dots that would not assemble into anything quite as beautiful as a painting by Georges Seurat.
