(jazzy music)
Male: Impressionism is so often painting
of modern life, of activities that we engage in now.
Female: Things that we do every day.
We go to cafes.
We go to performances.
We sit in bars, we have a drink.
We stroll down the boulevards.
This is the stuff of modern life
and the stuff of impressionist painting.
Male: In fact, the painting that we're looking at
is a painting that is about what we are doing right now,
that is, looking at paintings.
Female: (chuckles) Right.
I almost feel as though I'm looking in a mirror
when I look up at this painting.
Male: In fact, we're in the Museum of Fine Arts
in Boston, looking at Edgar Degas' Visit to a Museum.
Female: We think that the painting shows
Mary Cassatt, Degas' friend because Degas
actually did a series of prints of Mary Cassatt
in two different galleries in the Louvre.
He also did another oil painting of this subject.
He also did pastels, so it was clearly one
that he really liked, but he did that with his subjects.
Once he found a subject, like the races,
or the ballet, or the nude,
he would visit it time and time again and rework it.
He clearly did that with this subject.
Male: In fact, art historians think that perhaps
the woman who's seated is Mary Cassatt's sister, Lydia.
Female: Degas and Mary Cassatt were friends
for 40 years and Degas actually was the one
who suggested that Mary Cassatt exhibit
with the impressionist group, which she did.
She was the only American to do so.
Male: They were really like-minded.
It's interesting because Degas is often criticized
as being a misogynist, somebody who has
a very difficult time with women;
but it's a more complex issue
and it has to do also with class.
Mary Cassatt had come from a very wealthy
American family, and so in some ways,
although she did not have the pedigree
that Degas' family name had, they were on par.
Female: The story is that Mary Cassatt
saw a Degas in a shop window and pressed her nose
against the window so that she could see it
and take it in and really admired it;
and that similarly Degas saw a painting
by Mary Cassatt in 1874 and really admired it
and saw her as a kindred spirit.
Male: In fact, Degas is quoted saying to Mary Cassatt,
"Most women paint as though they are
" trimming hats. Not you."
So they had this really close relationship.
Cassatt is reported to have stepped in
when models were not able to do exactly
what Degas wanted them to do.
Female: Degas took Mary Cassatt as his model
for this subject of At the Museum
because by doing so he was immediately
taking a woman who was interested in looking at art
and who had a really good eye,
and a really intelligent eye.
Male: Look at the pose that he's placed her in.
Her head is cocked back.
She is really assessing and there is
a sense of the discerning here.
Female: It's interesting, this balance
of looking at printed material
and looking at visual material
that's on the walls of the gallery.
That's something that we see around us
if we just look around this gallery that we're in today.
Male: This is a painting that's in some ways
about the way we read the visual.
It's a painting about seeing.
The subject is somebody looking at art as we,
the viewers in the museum, are looking at art,
so there's this perfect replication.
Female: But more than looking,
Mary Cassett is standing, tilting, gesturing, moving.
So is her companion, holding the book,
looking up, tilting her head.
I think that's precisely what Degas was interested in,
the same way that he's interesting in gesture
if we look at other subjects that he found compelling,
like milliners, or ballet dancers; the way
that they stand, the way that they move.
I think there was something really interesting
and modern to Degas about the way people move,
and look at art, and gesture, and stand in an art museum.
Male: Right.
It's an expression of the modern world.
It's interesting and, I think, instructive
to think about what Degas has not focused on.
He has not shown us what the specific works
of art are that she is looking at.
We can't even see the body or the dress all that clearly.
The entire painting is beautifully brushy
and it gives a sense of the momentary.
Female: That's right.
If anything is specific it's the gesture,
it's the posture.
I think that Degas is very much thinking
about the kinds of questions that Baudelaire
raised, putting away the rhetorical gestures
of history painting, of images of ancient
Greece and Rome that we think of when we think
about salon paintings by Couture or Gerome or Bouguereau.
For Degas' viewers, this must have looked ugly.
These aren't the graceful gestures of painting
condoned by the Royal Academy.
These are really modern and, in some ways,
ugly gestures; the way you might capture
someone sitting on the subway.
Male: All the paint is really quite muddy as well.
The colors are muddy.
The composition is also at odds
with what academic painting would expect.
They're looking to the upper right,
but the painting's construction, the orthogonals,
look, for instance, at the bench,
the way the plane of the floor meets the plane of the wall,
all of that rushes to the upper left,
so they're in opposition to each other.
There's this real sense of movement
and energy in the painting that's created
by this compositional opposition that he's constructed,
but it is so much at odds with the way
that an academic painting would be organized.
Female: Right.
In an academic painting we would likely see
what they were looking at and we would see
their expressions and there would be some
narrative to be constructed out of that,
but that's not what interested Degas.
(jazzy music)