Mary Cassatt, the maternal body, and modern connoisseurship.
Item
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Title
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Mary Cassatt, the maternal body, and modern connoisseurship.
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Identifier
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AAI3103121
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identifier
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3103121
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Creator
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Ivinski, Pamela Anne.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Carol Armstrong
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Date
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2003
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Art History | Women's Studies
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Abstract
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As a woman in a male-dominated profession, a somewhat latecoming American participant in what has come to be defined as "French Impressionism," and a figure painter working within an artistic movement that is now most often seen publicly in exhibitions of landscapes, Mary Cassatt has been written out of many histories of art, with most studies of her work either taking biographical shape, concentrating ahistorically on her mother and child imagery, or bracketing her career within the category of "woman artist"---something the artist herself fought against by refusing to participate in "women only" exhibitions. While these approaches have carved out a space for the deserved recognition of an oeuvre without a comfortable art historical home, they all too frequently serve to confirm the validity of a formalist modernism that finds little of interest or value in her work. And to try to understand---even to celebrate---Cassatt's mother and child images outside history is to suggest that the family is unchanging or "natural" and that she has somehow managed to capture some essential truth about maternity.;"Mary Cassatt, the Maternal Body, and Modern Connoisseurship" examines the artist's maternal imagery and the critical response to it within the cultural context of her time as well as in relation to the continuing problem of the place of the woman artist within various bodies of art historical knowledge. Primary among these is the development of formalism, as it emerged from the "modern connoisseurship" of Bernard Berenson in particular. The many parallels between efforts to define a woman's role as solely within the family (as debated in the popular press and in new fields of study including psychoanalysis), to give connoisseurship the status of a "science," and to theorize formalism during the artist's lifetime will be understood to be not merely uncanny coincidences, but as motivated in part by women's efforts to assert themselves outside the home, in the political, social, economic, and artistic realms.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
