PHILADELPHIA — Prior to the 20th century, many women painters had artist fathers thrilled to welcome them into the family practice. And then there was Mary Cassatt, whose father was a stockbroker. She recalled that when she told him of her ambition to be a painter, he responded, “I would almost rather see you dead.”
Despite his opposition, Cassatt went on to have a successful and multifaceted career. Alas, during her lifetime and in the century since her death in 1926, the painter, printer, and pastels virtuoso has often been reduced to a single aspect of her life and work — for instance, as the only American associated with the French Impressionist movement; as the intimate of Edgar Degas; and as the woman who encouraged American collectors to buy the French paintings that became the foundation of several significant museum collections, including that of The Met, the National Gallery of Art, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Only recently have these institutions begun to reframe Cassatt and her work in full. In 1998, the Art Institute of Chicago’s exhibition Mary Cassatt: Modern Woman led the way. This year, Philadelphia’s Museum of Art redoubled that effort with Mary Cassatt at Work, which conveys how upper-middle-class women like Cassatt relished their new freedoms. The women in Cassatt’s artworks hold the reins of a carriage, ride mass transit, attend museums, the theater, and the orchestra. Some wanted to be seen; others wanted to see and hear; still others, especially Cassatt, wanted to create the art on public view. Some in her social class were shocked by how she defied the unspoken rule that real ladies didn’t work for a living. The exhibition, in part, contrasts the ladies who don’t work for a living with those who must.
Curators Jennifer Thompson and Laurel Garber organize Cassatt’s work by material (paint, pastel, print) and by theme (handwork, handiwork, childcare), and include family correspondence that attests to the painter’s work ethic and immersion in her practice. Between the ages of six and 11, the artist, who was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania (now part of Pittsburgh), lived abroad with her family, where she learned French and German. In 1860, at 16, Mary enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts with her parents’ consent. A fellow student was Thomas Eakins, who was allowed to paint models in the nude. Not so Cassatt, because women were prohibited from taking courses that involved nude models.
She spent much of her 20s and 30s negotiating around and over such hurdles, including parental resistance and the male-only École de Beaux-Arts in Paris, which did not admit female students. Yet Cassatt’s family had the means for her to create her own curriculum. For the latter, she took private lessons after arriving in Paris in 1965, choosing her professors wisely. Beginning with her 1868 oil painting, “The Mandolin Player,” her work was invited to the Paris Salon a total of six times. Her own modesty kept her from exploring the nocturnal nightlife of the capital, a motif of so many male Impressionists.
When her father insisted that her vocation pay for itself, Mary sought portrait commissions and made copies of Old Master paintings to support her art. While Mr. Cassatt’s decree may not have had the result he hoped for, it spurred his daughter to become a professional, to make the leap from privileged amateur to working artist.
Though this exhibition encourages viewers to focus on the art itself rather than the timeline, if you look at Cassatt’s work chronologically things start to click for her in the mid-1870s. In 1875, she saw a show of Degas pastels that was life and career changing. She loved the spontaneity and ease of the medium: She could draw with color, but didn’t have to mix pigments or wait eons for the paint to dry, as with oils. Cassatt rendered her pastels with dynamic strokes similar to the excited brushwork of her canvases.
She was formally introduced to Degas, who admired her drawing skills, two years later, and by the end of the decade he invited her to show with the group of Independents. Today, we call the them the Impressionists.
She exhibited 12 works in pastels and oils. They include “Little Girl in Blue Armchair,” an informal double portrait in which a Belgian Griffon and young girl have collapsed on vivid azure-colored chairs, and a pastel of the art collector Moyse Dreyfus (not in the show). From a distance it looks like a serene mid-19th-century portrait of a kindly elder. Up close, note the armchair on which he rests explodes in cobalt blue and abstract flecks of orange. Both of these works typify a Cassatt adage that “To be a great painter you must be classic as well as modern.”
The work in the exhibition likewise emphasize her brilliance as a colorist. No one does rose pink like Cassatt’s in “Woman in a Loge,” where the seated figure (believed to be Mary’s sister, Lydia) is pearlescent as the choker she wears, pink as her cheeks, silk frock, and strawberry-blond hair.
The exhibition also takes a deep dive into the artist’s process with Hiroshige-inspired woodblock prints, which reveal her subtle and time-consuming modifications to achieve her desired balance of line and color. “The Bath,” (1891), an emotionally subdued image of a caregiver and baby next to a basin, glows with exhilarating color against its mottled lilac background, the adult’s pistachio-green print dress, and the cerulean basin.
There are many takeaways from this exhibition, both sensuous and instructive. I wasn’t aware that many of Cassatt’s mother-and-child images depict paid model as caregivers, or of the degree to which she depicted women knitting, embroidering, playing instruments, and otherwise working with their hands. And while I knew of her lost mural from the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, portraying women reaping the fruits of knowledge, I did not know of her commitment to the Suffragist cause.
And not until I read the family correspondence on display did I learn that her father, once her most persistent critic, was, by 1880, one of her most enthusiastic champions.
Mary Cassatt at Work continues at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) through September 8. The exhibition was curated by Jennifer Thompson and Laurel Garber.
It will travel to the San Francisco Legion of Honor from October 5, 2024–January 26, 2025.
