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Instructor: Viken Berberian

Student: Safaryan Ani

Critique Essay

18.09.20

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926), In the Loge,1878. Oil on canvas, 81 cm × 66 cm (32 in × 26 in),

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

The Act of Looking

In her painting "In the Loge," French Impressionist Mary Cassatt brilliantly disrupts the

traditional male gaze of the woman and her role in society. Cassatt's female protagonist

undercuts the traditional dynamics of gazing and instead reflects a new hierarchy in which

women are also positioned as privileged viewers and setters of societal standards in matters that

shape gender power relations.

In Cassatt's remarkable painting, the central figure is a spectator: a woman in black,

leaning on her elbow, watching the performance through her opera glasses, fully engaged in the
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production. Cassatt depicts her sitting by herself, very comfortable surveying the audience with

her binoculars. Her gestures exude independence, fierceness, and confidence. Although the scene

is the opera, the most important part, the stage, is still not shown, the painting depicting a section

of the audience, implying that the greater significance in the theatre at the time was assigned not

to the performance itself but to the relations between the viewers there.

While many male artists, including Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Degas, depicted women in

theater boxes as objects of display (Saint Louis Art Museum, 2018), Cassatt's female protagonist

disrupts traditional dynamics of gazing and instead reflects a new hierarchy of gazes, in which

women are also positioned as gazers. Cassatt firmed view was that the painting needed to

represent modern life, and her modern woman is not accompanied by man as women had to be in

Paris when out in public. However, even if a companion is merely out of sight, the woman in

black still presents a departure from women's role in nineteenth-century France. Likewise, the

artist empowers her feminist icon's individuality by clothing and posture. Cassatt clad her heroin

in a solemn and muted black dress and chose a specific posture to empower her gaze. The angle

of her arm, combined with the upright post behind her, supports this position. Furthermore, by

hiding the fan, "women in black" is oppressing a symbol of her femininity and maintains the

representation of a thoroughly engaged modern woman, powerful and aggressive in her gaze.

In the picture, there is also a second figure: a man also dressed in black and leaning on

his elbow, also looking attentively through a pair of opera glasses – but he is watching her and

not the performance. The female figure gazes and is being gazed at simultaneously by a man of

possibly equal economic standing but of higher social status – because of his gender.

Interestingly, however, the woman in black does not seem to notice the man gazing at her or has

decided to ignore him. She continued looking where she was looking. In this way, the artist
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flawlessly illustrates that a man can not possess the power over her and that she makes a

paradigm shift by not accepting the role of being an object, rather acts independently. It's

absolutely amazing how clearly Cassatt represents the complicated relationship between the

gaze, public spectacle, gender, and class privilege.

This work definitely worthy of being discussed since It is extremely brave how 19th-

century female artist has dared to make gaze a key concept in studying the gendered landscape.

The gaze is "not just a look or a glance. It is a means of constituting the gaze's identity by

distinguishing her or him from that which is gazed at (Mizhoeff, 2003, p.164)." In his Ways of

Seeing" (1972, p.45), Berger discusses conventions of gazing in the European visual arts as in

those of the Renaissance and concludes that they have been framed by a dynamism based upon

which "men act and women appear." Here, women tend to be depicted in order "to flatter" the

male gazer (1972, p.64), who usually functions as both the owner and the viewer of the painting.

Nevertheless, Cassatt's structuring of gazes reflected the new gendered social landscape where

she illustrates an amusing interplay between the idea of the male gaze and the female gaze,

where the gaze is not gendered. Cassatt's painting efficiently displays the act of looking and

breaks down the traditional boundaries between the observer and the observed, the audience, and

the performer.

References:

Berger, J. 1972 (p.45,64). Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin

Mirzoeff, N. 2003 (p.164). An Introduction to Visual Culture. New York: Routledge

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Saint Louis Art museum. 2018The artistic friendship of Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas.
https://www.slam.org/blog/the-artistic-friendship-of-mary-cassatt-and-edgar-degas/