Mary Cassatt shaped French impressionism alongside Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro, yet spent a century largely overlooked in the country where she created her finest work.
Paris art institutions are now confronting that omission with a major retrospective.
The Musée d’Orsay has gathered 80 paintings, pastels, and prints for a career-spanning survey, The Guardian reported. The collection opens in Paris before moving to London early next year.
Exhibition curators trace that historical neglect to her background and subject matter. Caroline Corbeau-Parsons cited two primary factors for her absence from mainstream French art history.
“She was overlooked because she was a woman and a foreigner.”
Corbeau-Parsons added that critics stereotyped Cassatt’s portfolio because she focused predominantly on mothers and children. Those domestic scenes addressed social and private lives that nineteenth-century conventions severely restricted.
Cassatt described herself as American through and through, despite living in France for decades. Born into a wealthy Pennsylvania banking family with French Huguenot roots, she arrived in Paris in 1866 at age 21.
French art schools barred women from formal enrollment during her early years in the capital. She studied privately with masters from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts and copied masterpieces inside the Louvre.
Anne Robbins, who curated the exhibition, explained that Cassatt’s buyers complicated her legacy in France. Most of her canvases sold to American collectors rather than staying in French public hands.
“Although Mary Cassatt’s work is represented in the Musée d’Orsay collection, her presence there is significantly less prominent than that of her fellow impressionists, including Berthe Morisot and Marie Bracquemond, the two other ‘ladies of impressionism’, to use the words of art critic Gustave Geffroy in 1894.”
Robbins said that Cassatt also missed out on major French collections of her era. That absence kept her paintings out of national museum catalogues for generations.
Edgar Degas invited Cassatt to exhibit with the rebel artists known as the intransigents. That collective included Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Édouard Manet, Alfred Sisley, and Pissarro.
Degas and Cassatt forged a close working partnership, collaborating on multiple projects like Cassatt’s painting Little Girl in a Blue Armchair. Cassatt subsequently introduced American collectors to Degas and his impressionist peers.
Her most ambitious project, a monumental four-meter by eighteen-meter mural titled Modern Woman for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, has since disappeared. The Musée d’Orsay exhibition displays a digital recreation of the lost piece.
The exhibition transfers to the National Portrait Gallery in London in January, followed by a subsequent run at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
The show includes 80 paintings, pastels, and prints drawn from private European and US collections, alongside unpublished private letters.
Yes, she was recognized while she lived, but in the century following her death in June 1926, France hosted only one retrospective of her work.
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