A Very Full Week

Among the works along a second-floor West Building hallway is Clodion's "Poetry and Music." (Courtesy of The National Gallery of Art)

Tony Canova and Hank Raeburn.

Looks like it's been Blake's week with the boys -- as my wife points out over breakfast.

There are easy excuses to be made: European society used to be so good at oppressing women that they barely ever had a chance to make impressive art; the very few Old Mistresses who beat the odds -- Artemisia Gentileschi, Angelica Kauffmann -- are now so much in demand that it's hard for the National Gallery to build holdings of their work.

But excuses they are, so I set off to see if I can change my record before the week is up.

Easy. Gallery 83 is full of works by American impressionist Mary Cassatt, in a concentration you'll rarely see in other major art museums.

Or half full, at least. The other half of the paintings in the room -- all of which are pictures of women -- are almost all by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. And it's my pleasure to report that Cassatt beats the French guy cold. (Not that great a feat. Renoir is the most overrated artist I can think of.) Where a Renoir buys into every cliche of how a woman ought to look and how she should be treated, a Cassatt questions them.

Renoir's ladies are precious and pretty to a fault -- about as interesting as the flowers he also liked to paint, or the bright oils he painted them with. Cassatt's women are complex, often seeming troubled as they sit for her.

Cassatt's 1891 "Woman With a Red Zinnia" ought to be as tame as its title: You expect a dreamy woman as beautiful as the flower she contemplates, and sharing its transient splendor. Except that Cassatt's raw-cheeked young redhead looks as if she could hoist a side of beef. She holds the flower as though she's never bothered picking one. She barely even looks at it, as the poetic damsel is supposed to do in standard treatments of this subject. She seems absorbed in her own private thought rather than in acting out trite sentiment. Cassatt doesn't merely turn away from Victorian ideas of womanhood; she takes them on and turns them inside out.

Ditto in "The Loge," Cassatt's 1882 painting of two girls sitting in an opera box. It echoes Renoir's "La Loge," painted in 1874 and now in London -- and one of his few really excellent pictures. Renoir's painting, which was hugely praised just when Monet's first impressionist landscapes were being savaged, is all about the ogling that went on in 19th-century theaters. Renoir's flamboyantly dressed woman presents her face and cleavage for everyone to see; her male companion hoists his opera glasses to check out other babes. All an untroubled vision of the status quo.

Cassatt's two teens, on the other hand, seem on the spot, even in the crosshairs, as they occupy their box. It may be my imagination -- expressions are always hard to read -- but they seem to have the look of people who know they're being ogled, and are determined to pretend they don't. They are wolf-whistlees who don't want the attention. One of the girls has spread her fan to hide her bare chest; the other drops her shoulders as though she wished that she could cover up. There's no doubt that there is pathos in this picture, where Renoir's has only exultation.

Even Cassatt's paint argues that beauty isn't always pretty stuff. From a distance, the painting's surface looks as if it will offer up the usual impressionist bouquet of color. But get close, and you see that it's a clotted mess of workings and reworkings, like a prom-night makeup job. The trouble that's conveyed in the subject of the painting is there in its treatment, too.