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theses

Best known for her intimate depictions of women and children in domestic spaces, Cassatt is typically relegated to the role of the female observer. While feminist scholars such as Griselda Pollock acknowledged the artist’s radical style, most contributions largely overlook the inspiration behind her choice of subject and remain confined to essentializing interpretations around maternity, class, and domesticity. By contrast, my dissertation argues that Cassatt’s artistic practice utilized the visual language of contemporary science and medicine to intervene in discourses of gender and health. I trace signifiers of health and/or malady in her images to demonstrate that her interventions were deliberate and shaped by her lived experience of caregiving and loss. As Cassatt negotiated the inconsolable loss of loved ones, some under her care, we observe the inflection of the artist’s eye with the caregiver’s gaze. I reinterpret the painter’s work through the framework of trauma and care and provide a lens to examine the visual culture of caregiving. In summary, my research repositions the canonical treatment of Cassatt's domestic and maternal subjects as a dialogue between her trauma-informed artistic practice and discourses of gender and health.Chapter one traces Cassatt’s vision of femininity by linking her distinctive criteria of the beauty of health and strength to the non-normative signifiers she used to emphasize the vitality of her subjects. The artist established a complete focus on the feminine form eliminating the male figure. Both the visual resources and the artist’s correspondence are used to demonstrate that the evolution of her vision was informed by her gendered experience as a daughter, as an artist and as a suffragist. Chapter two explores Cassatt’s portraits of her family and friends, specifically identifying potent but overlooked signifiers of disease and impending death on their very figures. The family’s history of bereavement and the artist’s caregiving experience of her indisposed family are studied as the catalytic events that caused a shift in her oeuvre when she began to paint and associate pictures of children being held by their mothers with the subject of care. Chapter three argues that the disease signifiers journey onto her maternal subject and her construction of the young body mirrors the scrutinizing gaze of a concerned caregiver, while a highly constructed form of nudity serves as a receptive surface for the deliberate manifestation of wellness or disease. The images of women and children are utilized to establish a phenomenological connection between her artistic practice and her preoccupation with care. Chapter four examines the artist’s utilization of an interchangeable identity of the mother and the nurse that broadens the scope of the caregiver/cared-for subject beyond the scope of maternity to include daughters, sisters, wives, friends, professional nurses and communities that were expressly founded to take on the responsibility of the care of another. The public perspective on care is compared with the artist’s visual lexicon to highlight the value she designated to the subject.

http://dissertations.umi.com/gsnb.rutgers:12403

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

doi:10.7282/t3-gxrf-k012

The author owns the copyright to this work.