Mary Cassatt at Work
by Mark Van Proyen
Legion of Honor, San Francisco, California
Exhibition continues through January 26, 2025
November 16, 2024
“Mary Cassatt at Work,” 2024 installation view at the Legion of Honor, San Francisco. Photo: Gary Sexton.
This is the long past due first major exhibition of Mary Cassatt’s work to ever be held on the West Coast, and the only one to be held in North America since 1958. And it is a stupendous, knock-out show. Over 150 paintings, pastels, etchings, and colored dry point prints span the years 1873 to 1908. From 1908 to her death at the age of 82 in 1926, Cassatt was unable to continue working because of failing eyesight, a bitter fate for the workaholic artist. Curated by Jennifer A. Thompson and Laurel Garber for the Philadelphia Museum, “Mary Cassatt at Work” is accompanied by a 300-page catalog containing nine essays delving into specific aspects of the artist’s work.
Cassatt was one of the youngest among the artists to present work in any of the eight legendary Impressionist exhibitions that we held in Paris between 1874 and 1886, participating in four of them. Each was called the “Salons des Indepéndants,” highlighting their brazen departure from the officially sanctioned painting upheld by the French Academy, while also signaling that their ranks were not entirely made up of Impressionists (Cassatt was indeed among the Impressionists). Cassatt was one only three female artists to be included in any of them, the only one who was American born, though she spent most of her adult life in France.
Mary Cassatt, “Lydia at the Tapestry Frame,” 1881, oil on canvas. Courtesy of the Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, Michigan.
“Mary Cassatt at Work” is a perfectly ironic title for this exhibition. Oftentimes, when we think of Impressionism, our minds wander to luxuriant country landscapes experienced in languorous fits of bourgeois indolence. Those painterly reveries were amplified by the availability of recently developed pigments that were the new by-products of metallurgical advances related to industrial manufacture, providing unprecedented chromatic intensity.
At the same time, Paris had earned its reputation as “the city of light” because of the then-futuristic installation of specular electric lights illuminating its neighborhoods, culminating with the finished construction of the Eiffel Tower in 1889. Even though Cassatt resorted to the same sumptuous ebullient colors favored by her Impressionist colleagues, she rarely painted landscapes or cityscapes, excepting for a few images of seated women in private gardens or awaiting the start of an opera. Almost exclusively, she depicted intimate domestic scenes that almost never involved men, nor did she ever produce self-portraits.
Mary Cassatt, “Mary Edison Embroidering,” 1877, oil on canvas, 28 3/4 x 23”. Courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
There are many single figure images here, excellent examples of which include “Lydia at the Tapestry Frame” (1881) or “Mary Edison Embroidering,” (1877). These works reveal a subtle tension in Cassatt’s asethetic, having to do with the way that she paints the faces and bodies of her subjects in relation to the garments that they wear and other nearby fabrics. Prior to her joining up with the Impressionists, she studied with the French Neoclassical painter Jean Léon Gerome, who influenced her approach to painting and drawing the figure. Careful observation can detect that influence throughout her body of work, even as her subtly classical figurative bodies are frequently hidden behind the clothes they wear and other pictorial elements where painterly fantasy moves into the foreground.
Mary Cassatt, “Little Girl in a Blue Armchair,” 1877-78, oil on canvas, 35 1/4 x 51”.
Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
There are many images of pre-teen children, such as “Little Girl in a Blue Armchair” (1877-78), in which a young girl reclines in a subtly provocative pose, surrounding by a rich symphony of blue and green patterns. In “Francoise in Green, Sewing” (1908-09), Cassatt synthesizes the influences of fellow Impressionists such as Eduard Manet and Edgar Degas (who was a close personal friend). One also can see echoes of Pierre August Renoir’s style, minus his sickly-sweet palate. We can also begin to see hints that the “work” referred to in the exhibition’s title is the oftentimes unrecognized emotional labor that women performed and, in our very different world, still perform in domestic circumstances, be it housekeeping or child rearing.
Even though Cassatt never married or had any children of her own, she consistently focused on representing different aspects of the mother-child relationship, much more so than any other painter in the second half of the 19th century or the entire century that followed. This fact prompts a digressive observation, which in good part pertains to the paucity of contemporaneous treatments of the same subject. Her uniqueness lends a curious authority to her work that is more remarkable because female domesticity was a prominent theme practiced by male artists during previous centuries. The religious theme of the Madonna and child was, of course, among the most repeated themes of medieval art.
Mary Cassatt, “Françoise in Green, Sewing,” 1908-09, oil on canvas, 32 x 25 3/4”.
Courtesy of the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, Alabama.
Did the rise of industrialism have any causal connection to a cultural disruption of what the psychoanalyst Nancy Chodorow called “The Reproduction of Mothering,” with all of its emotional, psychological and social consequences following suit? Partial answers are offered by the almost three dozen images in the exhibition that explore the mother-child theme, but the one that drives the point home is her 1889 portrait of “Mrs. Robert J. Cassatt,” who was the artist’s mother. Wearing a blue-gray shawl over a black dress, sporting a dour face, truncated hands and the body language of resignation and defeat, this is a deeply unhappy woman portrayed in tonalist colors that stray far from Impressionist chromaticism. No doubt, if there is a backstory to Cassatt’s many explorations of the mother/child dyad, this is the painting that unlocks what that story might be.
