painting of the month

Colored Forms II -- August Macke, 1913 (Wilhelm Hack Museum)

mary and the bullfighter

As a young woman, Mary Stevenson Cassatt was determined not to let her gender keep her from becoming a serious artist. Following her graduation from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, she trained with Academic painter Jean-Léon Gérôme in Paris and in 1872 visited Italy and Spain to study the works of the Old Masters. In Madrid, Mary greatly admired the 17th century art of Diego Velázquez at the Museo del Prado. Mary was perhaps also inspired to travel to Spain by the work that Edouard Manet had exhibited following his own 1865 Spanish visit. Manet had a strong influence on younger painters of his time, and his striking Dead Toreador and The Bullfight no doubt caught Cassatt’s eye.

The Spanish culture and visual landscape were exciting to Mary and after Madrid she went further to Seville. Cassatt’s subtlety comes through in her 1873 painting Spanish Dancer Wearing a Lace Mantilla, while her skill with color and detail can be seen in On the Balcony, where two young women flirt with a suitor. Cassatt captures the flowered dresses, bright shawls and coy expressions of the women, while making the male presence less facially detailed yet still dominating as he extends his arm proprietarily. The woman in red seems wistful as the man focuses attention on her companion, and she gazes down at life beyond her railed perch with perhaps a longing to find a truer love.

In the same year’s Offering the Panale to the Bullfighter, Cassatt set up a scene between another woman with a flower in her dark hair giving a bullfighter a panale, or sweet treat. In this painting, Cassatt minimizes the girl while fully showing the bullfighter, his expression just a shade arrogant and expectant. He is, after all, a killer of the bulls (!) and women surely adore him. Cassatt again offers a fine sense of masculine/feminine physical stances, with the bullfighter’s dominant posture and the woman’s more yielding position.

Cassatt’s After the Bullfight could be considered her most intriguing Spanish-influenced painting, mainly because of the artistic statement it makes. In Cassatt’s day, a kind of artistic decorum allowed men to paint nudes, dancers, actresses, or whatever female they happened to be obsessed with — as long as the work kept within the boundaries of what was then considered decency. 19th century women artists, however, generally had to limit their paintings to still-lifes, landscapes, classical or Biblical scenes, portraits of other women, children or animals, with maybe an occasional husband, brother or fatherly study.

In Cassatt’s After the Bullfight, a toreador smokes a cigarette and savors his latest triumph. He looks confident both inside the arena and beyond it, yet he is not a romantic caricature. Here Cassatt not only chose a subject equal to the Spanish works of Manet, she asserted her right as a female artist to depict a virile and attractive man.

Cassatt’s knowledge of bullfighters is presumed to not have come from actual attendance but from Théophile Gautier’s 1845 Travels in Spain. Gautier’s guidebook gives extensive and graphic details of the bullfight tradition and the ornate outfits of those involved, noting how the toreador “has no defensive armour, he is dressed as if for a ball…a pin could pierce his satin jacket; all he has is a bit of stuff and a frail sword.” Gautier also notes the crowd’s enjoyment of the sport’s violence and love for the man who either kills or is gored by the enraged and tormented bull.

After her Spanish sojourn, Mary Cassatt returned to Paris. She was eventually invited to exhibit independently with the French Impressionists by Edgar Degas, and she would become close friends with Degas and linked with the Impressionist group throughout the rest of her life.

Sources:

• After the Bullfight, Interpretive Resource – The Art Institute of Chicago
• Offering the Panale to the Bullfighter – The Clark Art Institute

suzanne and somerset

Suzanne Valadon was born in 1865 and grew up fatherless in Paris. She learned to fend for herself early on and held various jobs, including being a circus trapeze artist. Her striking looks made her a sought-after model to such painters as Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec, and she also found a teacher and patron in Edgar Degas. Suzanne had many romances and eventually gave birth to painter Maurice Utrillo, though it was never clear as to who Maurice’s real father was. Suzanne’s art showed a fine use of color and unique perception, and as a feline lover, she did a truly outstanding job in depicting cats.

Somerset Maugham often included artist characters in his novels, and in The Razor’s Edge it seems pretty likely that Suzanne Rouvier came from Suzanne Valadon. Maugham describes his Suzanne’s independent yet resourceful nature and her own artistic work, both as muse and creator. In the novel, Suzanne has an affair with Larry, but when Larry is ready to say goodbye, she doesn't question his need to move on.

Suzanne Rouvier is one of the more vibrant characters in The Razor’s Edge, though Maugham does tend to minimize her artwork. He describes Suzanne as essentially mimicking her artist lovers’ styles, “landscape like the landscape painter, abstractions like the cubist,” until her present lover and patron tells her not to imitate men but to use a more feminine style, and to not “aim to be strong; be satisfied to charm.” And while the real Suzanne Valadon encouraged her son to take up painting to challenge his often self-destructive behavior, Razor’s Edge Suzanne has a daughter instead and pragmatically urges the girl to learn to type and study stenography.

Click to see Suzanne Valadon’s portrait of composer Erik Satie, another of her boyfriends and one who apparently was quite crazy about her. It seems that her perception of Satie was quite good and not just imitative -- and unlike Suzanne Rouvier -- that her pursuit of art might have been more than a hobby “she got a lot of fun out of.”

(Pictured: Suzanne Valadon by Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen)