voyeurism in the loge.

I am holed up in the library working on a paper about Mary Cassatt and her depictions of women in public, specifically, the Opera, since that's the only place a classy woman of 19th century Paris would have been allowed to go if she didn't want to be thought wildly immoral. 

I have been learning oh so many interesting things, FIRST that it appears she had an ambiguous platonic non-relationship with Degas, who could be charming and thoughtful and once bought her a puppy, but who would then get all grumpy and non-committal, sounds pretty TYPICAL to me! So they both ended up great friends yet died alone and left everything to their maids. I may have made up that last fact, but whatever. Degas was the one who invited Mary to join the Impressionists in 1877, after her work kept getting rejected by the Salon. 

I think it's interesting that even though Cassatt is now better known than Morisot, Morisot had been one of the founding members and already with the group for three years. Both were feisty personalities who held their own amongst all the witty, caustic, word-play loving boys. I can just see it all! 

OH, and fun fact, Cassatt became good friends with May Alcott, as in the model for Little Women's Amy. She was a painter whose work was once exhibited in the Parisian Salon, and she was gallavanting around Europe thanks to the success of Louisa's book... she married a dashing young musician, and it was all wonderful until she died shortly after childbirth. Boo. I always liked Amy. 

What else... women artists were usually rejected by the Salon unless the artist in question had some kind of flirty, flattering relationship with one of the judges. And if a judge did randomly show support for a woman's work, they were usually mocked and derided; "Why? Is she pretty?" 

So that's awesome and totally lends support to the argument of how there haven't been many "great" female artists because women just don't have as much talent. 

Speaking of creepy men, here are some scenes of Parisian opera. Aka voyeur central. Except good old Mary makes it a little more difficult for the viewer to be the voyeur, maybe, I don't know, that's what I'm going to be debating in my paper.