Mary Stevenson Cassatt, 'Little Girl in a Blue Armchair Date,' 1877 - 78. Medium: Oil on canvas. ... [+]
“Mary Cassatt at Work.” The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s exhibition title leads visitors in two separate, but equally important directions when considering the work of the only American French Impressionist. “Work” references both the dogged effort with which Cassatt (1844–1926) pursued her chosen profession of artist, and the labor often being performed by the subjects of her paintings, prints and drawings.
On view through September 8, 2024, the presentation brings together 130 works and rarely seen personal correspondence, illuminating Cassatt’s six-decade-long career investigating the interconnections of gender, labor, and agency, themes across her artmaking yet to be deeply explored. Her first large-scale exhibition in the U.S. in 25 years, “Mary Cassatt at Work” evidences why it’s important to return to the greats once a generation to see what might have been missed, to see what hits fresh to contemporary eyes.
In this case, it’s notions of caregiving as work. Recognizing the invisible work particular to the household and social spaces inhabited by her female subjects who were most often domestic employees.
So it goes for the artwork, as for the artist, it’s Cassatt’s artmaking as a source of independence and vital means of self-definition that comes into view. In the late 19th and early 20th century, it was exceptionally unusual for a woman to define herself by her career–unusual just to be allowed to pursue one outside of the home.
“Being a self-sufficient, professional artist and recognized as such by critics and collectors was vital to Cassatt’s identity from an early age,” Jennifer Thompson, exhibition co-curator and Curator of European Painting and Sculpture at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, told Forbes.com. “She enrolled in classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts at age 16 and spent the rest of her teens, twenties, and thirties gathering experience and building a career. She was unwavering in her dedication to her chosen vocation.”
To her friend, the collector Louisine Havemeyer, she wrote: “Oh the dignity of work, give me the chance of earning my own living, five francs a day and self-respect.”
Sentiments, it should be noted, easier to come by when born wealthy, as Cassatt was.
With 84 Cassatt artworks in its collection–36 included in the show–along with a large group of Cassatt family letters in its library and archives–she was born near Pittsburgh, but the family moved to Philadelphia when she was a child–the Philadelphia Museum of Art makes the perfect venue to do this work on Cassatt and see this work by Cassatt.
“The exhibition grew out of spending time with this correspondence and gaining a strong sense of the way Cassatt herself characterized her work—as all-consuming, as physically demanding, as fundamental to her sense of self,” Laurel Garber, exhibition co-curator and Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, told Forbes.com. “We also grew excited about the way our observations about Cassatt’s work allowed us to re-examine the activities of her subjects: the nursing, knitting, socializing, teaching, caring for and bathing infants came into new focus for us—less as scenes of leisure than as different kinds of activity and work.”
“Work,” two ways.
Heigh-Ho, Heigh-Ho
Mary Stevenson Cassatt, 'Lydia Seated in the Garden with a Dog on Her Lap,' 1878 - 79. Medium: Oil ... [+]
Cassatt’s life was defined by her work, and she wanted it that way. Today, we’d call her a grinder.
She never married, nor had kids, allowing her laser focus not to be distracted by domestic matters. Remarkable that the childless Cassatt would become one of the most accomplished and recognized painters of children in art history.
Perhaps the most famed of these, Little Girl in a Blue Armchair Date (1877-78), depicting a chronically bored girl dressed up and slouching in a chair on loan from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, appears in “Mary Cassatt at Work.” As does, arguably, her most recognizable painting, In the Loge Date (1878) from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, showing a woman spying the theater stage with opera glasses while a man in the background applies the same attention to her. This was the first of her Impressionist artworks ever shown in the U.S., in Boston, the same year it was produced.
Her ability to pursue work also explains why she chose to live out her life primarily in Paris after 1870.
In an 1894 letter to American curator and art advisor Sara Tyson Hallowell, Cassatt wrote: “After all give me France—women do not have to fight for recognition here, if they do serious work.”
Cassatt was nothing, if not serious.
“It’s clear to us from our collaborative study with our conservators how much Cassatt pushed her artistic techniques in order to understand the capacities and working properties of her materials. She didn’t just dabble in printmaking, for instance, as a corollary to her painting practice, she fully embraced it as an independent mode of expression,” Garber explained. “Though she came to printmaking decades into her artistic studies, in the end she made over 215 compositions in print, bought at least one printing press of her own so that she could make prints at home, and pioneered some of the most daring techniques and methods in the history of modern art. This is also the case for her expert working of pastel and painting—she deeply understood these materials from the inside out and constantly evolved her practice to better capture the subjects, scenes, and interactions that captivated her.”
These insights into her artistic practice revealed during “Mary Cassatt at Work,” along with its devotion to subject matter would have pleased the artist. Previous exhibitions of hers centered on biography or her standing as a groundbreaking female artist, not so much.
“Cassatt repeatedly advised her art dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, not to send her artwork to exhibitions comprised solely of women artists. She felt strongly about being a professional artist and wanted her art to be seen on an equal footing with that of her male and female colleagues,” Thompson said. “As a member of the French Impressionists, an artistic group uniquely comprised of men and women, she wanted her art to be evaluated alongside her peers regardless of gender.”
And it was, favorably, with Monet, Renoir, and her good friend Edgar Degas.
“Mary Cassatt at Work” reveals an artist whose interest in domestic labor–and recognition of it as such–as well as her unabashed ambitions in pursuing a professional career, would have been noteworthy in the 1970s and 80s, let alone the 1870s and 80s. She remains an essential, with essential understandings of her artwork yet to be shared.
Following its run in Philadelphia, the show travels to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Legion of Honor from October 5, 2024, to January 26, 2025.
