WASHINGTON — The friendship between Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas is one of the few remaining mysteries of Impressionism. She was a wealthy, independent American suffragist who painted upper-class women tending children and taking in the opera; he was a Frenchman, a decade older, who spied on nudes in brothels and once said that women couldn’t understand style.
Curators, mindful of the age difference and of Cassatt’s status as an expatriate living and working on Degas’s turf, have tended to show us a student-teacher relationship. So it’s refreshing to see, instead, a platonic power couple, as we do in “Degas/Cassatt” at the National Gallery.
With just 70 works squeezed into four small galleries, this show is not your typical Impressionist blockbuster. And it’s so focused on technique, so determined to avoid any hint of romance or paternalism, that it sometimes feels clinical.
Familiar paintings and pastels are outnumbered here by prints and drawings. But that focus ultimately proves to be a smart decision, as in MoMA’s show “Gauguin: Metamorphoses.” The unpolished, process-oriented works by Degas and Cassatt present both artists in a new light, allowing viewers a glimpse of the inspiration each found in the work of the other.
One exception to the limited role of major paintings: the Cassatt masterpiece “Little Girl in a Blue Armchair,” from the National Gallery’s collection, which appears right at the beginning of the show. Fresh from a trip to the conservation lab, it dazzles with its predominant hue of deep turquoise.
A letter from Cassatt to her dealer Ambroise Vollard, also on view, proclaims that Degas worked on an area of the painting’s background; the recent cleaning and infrared photography have revealed that changes were indeed made. A horizontal line became a much more Degas-esque diagonal, and a small dog was moved from the floor to a soft chair in the foreground (where it has more of a rapport with the painting’s slouching subject.)
In smaller works shown nearby, Degas and Cassatt conduct separate but parallel material experiments with metallic paint, distemper and egg tempera. In her pastel “At the Theater,” for instance, Cassatt gives a subtle glint to the fan held by an operagoer; Degas, meanwhile, made his “Dancers (Fan Design)” shimmer with a liberal application of powdered silver.
More intense collaborations emerge in the next gallery, which is devoted entirely to prints. Most of them relate to an unrealized journal of 1879-80, Le Jour et la Nuit, which was to involve other Impressionists like Camille Pissarro and Gustave Caillebotte.
At the time, Cassatt was new to printmaking — she did not produce her most famous prints, the Japanese-influenced series of mothers and children, until the 1890s — but she threw herself into the project, with some help from Degas (who introduced her to the technique of soft-ground etching).
In that sense, he served as Cassatt’s mentor, an idea reinforced by a few of her tentative studies of standing nudes, seen from the back, which clearly echo voyeuristic works by Degas. But, on the whole, the prints convey a sense of shared enterprise. Both artists, for instance, allude to the journal’s title with bold silhouettes and other plays of light and dark — Degas in a marvelous scene of actresses in their dressing rooms, and Cassatt in a view of two women at the opera that relates to her well-known painting “The Loge” (also here).
The show organizer and the museum’s associate curator of French paintings, Kimberly A. Jones, argues that Degas and Cassatt, seen in black and white, look more like equals. This view gives Cassatt a little edge, and lends gentility to Degas’s often dishabille actresses and women of the night.
But it can’t totally erase the distinctions between their social milieus. The fact remains that Degas could go places Cassatt couldn’t, even at the opera, where a woman without male accompaniment was restricted to the loge and limited to matinee performances. She could not roam the orchestra, or lurk backstage, or haunt the nighttime cafe-concerts, as Degas did to gather material for Jour et Nuit. Her subjects are inevitably boxed-in; only their eyes may wander, with the aid of opera glasses.
One place she could visit, with relative freedom, was the museum. In a pastel by Degas, “At the Louvre (Miss Cassatt),” she is clearly in her element, leaning jauntily on her umbrella as her companion (probably her sister) perches primly on a bench. Related prints and sketches make it clear that Degas appreciated Cassatt’s swagger; in some versions, he places her right at the center of the image, so that she eclipses the second figure.
He also made a more conventional portrait of Cassatt, albeit one that depicts her as a very unconventional woman; it shows her leaning forward, as if she were about to leap from her chair, displaying an aggression normally reserved for men (like the similarly posed print collector in an earlier Degas painting, seen in the catalog).
Cassatt liked the portrait enough to hang it in her studio. But some three decades later she sold it, writing to her dealer Paul Durand-Ruel in 1912 or 1913, “It has artistic qualities but it is painful and depicts me as such a repugnant person, I don’t want anyone to know that I posed for it.”
By that point, her friendship with Degas had become strained; they had taken opposite sides of the Dreyfus affair, and their artistic interests had diverged (with Degas moving closer to abstraction in loose pastels and continually reworked canvases, and Cassatt adopting a tight figurative realism influenced by Japanese prints and American painters like Thomas Eakins). Both artists, difficult personalities to begin with, were becoming more cantankerous with age and failing health. The distance is apparent in prints and paintings from the 1890s, in the show’s final gallery. Here the brushy, violent Degas canvas “Scene From the Steeplechase: The Fallen Jockey” is flanked by two precise, saccharine Cassatt paintings of women and children picking apples in Edenic orchards.
Fortunately, “Degas/Cassatt” does not leave us here. It has an alternate conclusion, of works the artists exchanged over the years, which supports the show’s theme of reciprocity. We can see that Degas owned multiple versions of Cassatt’s print “The Visitor,” of a woman calling on a friend in a well-appointed parlor, and that Cassatt had a large pastel of a Degas nude squatting over a washtub.
And we can appreciate that their friendship was — like many friendships between artists — professional, competitive and complicated. It was, in other words, a relationship of equals.
Correction: May 31, 2014
An art review on Friday about “Degas/Cassatt,” at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, referred imprecisely to the Museum of Modern Art’s show “Gauguin: Metamorphoses” in making a comparison between the exhibitions. The MoMA show is a current one running through June 8, not a “recent” show.
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