Whistler to Cassatt: A Revolutionary Movement

by Charles McGuigan 05.2022

It was a time not unlike other times. A time of almost climatic change, as new ideas blew away the archaic prevailing norms. Not much different than the time we now inhabit.

As you move from one gallery to the next at this exhibition, you witness that period—shortly before and shortly after the dawn of a new century—when America, through its artists, glimpsed the beginning of the modern era.

“That conflict between old and new, between the traditional and modern, is the underlying theme of this exhibition,” says Dr. Susan J. Rawles, who curated this exhibit which was organized by the Denver Art Museum.

In this exhibit titled “Whistler to Cassatt: American Painters in France,” more than 100 paintings by this country’s most renowned artists of the period—everyone from James Abbott McNeill Whistler to Mary Cassatt, from Winslow Homer to John Singer Sargent—are represented. They were expats who left their homeland to study in Paris, ground-zero of a revolutionary art movement that most of us know as Impressionism. When these artists returned stateside, their welcome, in some cases, was anything but warm.

“Because of these revolutionary developments, when American artists return home their French-inspired work is often accused of being ‘un-American,’” Dr. Rawles says.

At the gateway to the exhibit, you encounter a massive photographic panel depicting the Eiffel Tower, still under construction. “The partially completed view of the Eiffel Tower confronting you at the exhibition entrance is meant to drive home the fact that this is a transitional moment in art and history,” says Dr. Rawles. “Advocates of the Tower called it ‘the art of the modern engineer’; yet academics despaired of its ugliness – as something ‘even the Americans didn’t want.’”

My daughter Catherine, an artist herself, and I slowly meandered through one gallery after another, baptized in a dizzying array of form and color. As with all exhibits at the VMFA in recent memory, this one was created to whisk the visitor through rooms that emit a sense of time and place. Each gallery space is visually distinctive with the addition of music that further enhances the journey through this radical period in American art.

Of the galleries, Dr. Rawles says, “They traverse the distance from the academic to the modern. The path isn’t smooth, nor is it consistent, and it is peppered with important actors along the way – including James Abbot McNeill Whistler, whose intellectual and artistic impact changed the trajectory of contemporary art; and Mary Cassatt who, in addition to her extraordinary achievements as an artist, facilitated the creation of American private and public collections.”

In the very first gallery, there are a number of paintings by American artists that were embraced by the Academy because they adhered to the time-honored themes, both historical and biblical, that visually preached a gospel of virtue. But the very last painting in this hall breaks with that tradition. It was made by a woman named Elizabeth Nourse, and it foretells the shape of things to come. It is dominated by purples and greens and the subject is a woman in her home. And it has nothing to do with the old themes. This one seems to speak of the sacredness of the ordinary—sans symbols and sermons—panegyrics to the beauty inherent in nature and the mundane.

Each gallery widened our eyes. As Catherine put it, when we neared the end of the exhibit: “They’ve done an incredible job at showcasing these crucial moments in art history in novel ways. The curator has highlighted an aspect of one of the most well-known movements in art and has contextualized it into an American viewpoint.” A perfect assessment.

Along the way were scores of visual surprises, including a small piece by Winslow Homer, and another painting titled Springtime, by John Henry Twachtman, with vast negative spaces and amorphous trees and gauzy colors that seem to be drifting into expressionism.

For the longest while we moved through the large gallery space that was inhabited by the spirit of Mary Cassatt, the most famous woman artist in the world at the time, who preferred to be called an Independent rather than an Impressionist. Her paintings create calm and reflection, and demand dignity to women and motherhood and children, who for the first time are treated as individual beings with their own sensibilities, instead of adornments to a mythic narrative dominated by patriarchs.

As we left the museum and made our way to my daughter’s car, parked on Arthur Ashe Boulevard, we both stopped in our tracks at the same moment, responding to a massive shadow, and turned to look at the massive bronze sculpture of a triumphant young Black man mounted on a steed. This nameless man sports dreadlocks and is clad in torn jeans, and wears a pair of high top Nikes.

On about the time, a couple years ago, that this sculpture by Kehinde Wiley called “Rumors of War” was being unveiled, equestrian monuments from another age were coming down, one by one, to the hue and cry and a general gnashing of teeth by those unable to relinquish the past for the future; but art, like life, always moves forward, and there’s no stopping it.

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

200 North Arthur Ashe Boulevard

Richmond, VA 23220