Understood by Linda Nochlin

and applied to... Mary

Cassatt

Thomas Eakins

Art & Gender november 2011

Editor’s Letter

"Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?"

Nochlin explores why "greatness" in artistic accomplishment have been reserved for male geniuses. Arguing that general social expectations against women seriously pursu-ing art, restrictions on educating women at art academies, and "the entire romantic, elitist, individual-glorifying, and monograph-producing

substructure upon which the profes-sion of art history is based,” have systematically precluded the emergence of great women artists. She investigates the ways in which gender affects the creation and apprehension of art, as evidenced by her 1994 essay “Issues of Gender in Cassatt and Eakins”.

LINDA NOCHLINin

Art News 1971

Nochlin

the tensions, oppostiions, and achievements of American painting of the late nineteeth century can be best approached through an examination of two of its major practitioners---Mary Cassatt and Thomas Eakins.

“

”

Cassatt & Ea k i n s

two american artists

“It seems to me that there is no better way of exploring the vexed

issues of American-ness versus the cosmopolitanism represented by the

French vanguard of the period or male versus female production than in

exploring, in detail, the lives and works of these two artist contemporaries, so alike in their ambitions and stature, so

unlike in their choice of milieu and their pictorial language.”

Nochlin

GENDER and DIFFERENCEself portraits

Portrait of the Artist, 1878By Mary CassattMetropolitan Museum of Art

Self Portrait, 1902By Thomas Eakins

National Academy of Design

“Yet there are extraordinary differences between them inscribed in their work itself, as their self-portraits clearly reveal. Cassatt came from a much wealthier and more socially prominent family than Eakins. She did not return to conservative Philadelphia to pass the rest of her life, as a loner, like Eakins, but stayed on in Paris where she actively participated in the most advanced painting movement in her time, Impressionism..”Nochlin

cassatt & eakins

soci

al co

nst

ruct

s.

The Swimming Hole, 1883 By Thomas Eakins, Fort Worth Art Center

Five O’Clock Tea, 1880By Mary Cassatt, Museum of Fine Arts Boston

Max Schmitt in a Single Scull,1871By Thomas Eakins, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

sim

ilar

subje

cts.

Boating Party, 1893By Mary Cassatt, National Gallery of Art

pow

er o

f th

e g

aze.

Miss Amelia Van Buren, 1891By Thomas EakinsThe Phillips Collection, DC

Woman in Black at the Opera, 1880By Mary CassattMOFA Boston

relaxedoractive?

MODERN MOTHERHOOD

The First Caress, 1890By Mary CassattMetropolitan Museum of Art

Cassatt’s theme reveals her Impressionist ability to capture

the momentary, the intimate and the

playful; her gift of observation.

MODERN HEROISM

The Gross Clinic, 1875By Thomas Eakins

National Academy of Design

Eakins positions the one woman in the composi-tion as the one---the only one---who cannot look, who will not look.

JUSTANOTHERALLEGORY?

Women Picking Fruit, 1891By Mary CassattCarnegie Institute.

William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River, 1877By Thomas Eakins

Brooklyn Museum of Art.

THE END.tow n es & h o o d h o o d