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Darkness and Light
From solitary to the salon (Excerpt)
L.A. Weekly - May 7 - 13, 1999
By Robert Lloyd
THERE IS ANOTHER SORT OF SPECULATIVE FICTION that
instead of imagining the future refigures the past, providing new
explanations for old acts. Such are The Artists' Specials -- and its
companions The Composers' Specials and The Inventors' Specials --
HBO series for kids that write a young person, or persons, into the life
of a historical figure, in order to make history live.
In Mary Cassatt: American Impressionist, star Amy Brenneman (Your
Friends and Neighbors, NYPD Blue) finds her atelier upset by the
unexpected arrival from Philadelphia of her brother's family, including
a snobby sister-in-law so horrible it's hard to reckon why someone
hasn't taken a plank to her head, and three children who get
underfoot, make fun of modern art, fight and sulk (teenage Katherine
is missing the social season back home, while trying to deny the
rough charms of young Gilbert the gardener), until they quite
expectedly begin to improve each other's lot. There's Mary working
away in somber tones to please the taste of the Salon, when little
Elsie, sprawled in what art fans will recognize as the exact attitude of
Little Girl in a Blue Armchair (with that painting's little dog, here
called Wags -- and a bundle of trouble, you can imagine -- plopped
nearby), asks, "Why are you using all dark colors? . . . I like bright
colors. Blue is my favorite, but I like yellow and red, too." "So do I,"
says Aunt Mary, and -- voilą! -- a masterpiece is born. Katherine,
meanwhile, sets about trying to engineer a love connection between
Mary and Edgar Degas, represented by Thomas Jay Ryan (of Hal
Hartley's Henry Fool) as a kind of cute grump, allergic to flowers,
children and dogs. (Though I happen to know that not only did
Degas like dogs, he arranged to get one for Cassatt.) He utters his
famous line about refusing to believe a woman could draw so well,
offers practical advice about painting light coming through curtains
("give the paint in the background a scrubbed look") and doesn't
change her name to his -- though it looked to me they might well sleep
together after the show.
It's a silly thing, generally, but it stands up for the spiritual over the
material, inner life over outward appearance, merit over class, talent
over sex, the individual against (high) society, and for-art's-sake art as
a human good, and aims to make creative eccentricity heroic. Such
insanity is always welcome around these parts.
MARY CASSATT: American Impressionist | HBO | Premieres
Tuesday, May 11, 7 p.m.
Copyright © 1999 L.A. Weekly. All rights reserved.
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