Women and children first
Mary Cassatt made a name for herself in the art world at a time when very few women were acknowledged or even encouraged to participate. A U.S. expatriate from a wealthy Pennsylvania family, she got notice for her work in her home country but spent much of her life and cemented her reputation as an artist and arts patron in France in the latter part of the 19th century.
Inspired at first by European Old Masters— After The Bullfight (oil on canvas, 1873), one of the first canvases in the show, is clearly indebted to Velázquez—then by the contemporary Paris painters who would soon be dubbed Impressionists but thought of themselves as Independents, who would soon become her cohort, Cassatt set out to celebrate the everyday lives of women and children. It remained her primary focus until the last decade of her life, when she was forced to retire due to failing eyesight.
A crucial and paradigm-shifting influence on Cassatt and her contemporaries was an 1890 exhibition of Japanese woodblock prints at the the Ecole Nationale des Beaux Arts. Her work beginning that same year reflected their flattened planes, subtle color combinations, and pared-down rendering, especially in her prints. These form the highlight of the exhibition. Working in drypoint and aquatint, Cassatt captures private moments between mothers and children and women by themselves, often before mirrors. These are intimate scenes that benefit from their intimate scale. Oil paintings of the same motifs look blown up and garish by comparison. Not unlike her Impressionist brethren, the scientific discovery of the full-color spectrum made Cassatt hue-happy. Many of the oils end up looking more like decorative tapestries than pictures.
Museum exhibitions tend to want to focus on “major” achievements rather than more modest output. There is a substantial amount of room given here to a lost mural Cassatt designed for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Judging by the surviving photos, it looks like an idyllic rendering of women in a pastoral setting done on a grand scale; it could have been done by any number of artists. What made Cassatt stand apart is best seen up close: small scenes that nonetheless contain entire lives.
“Mary Cassatt: After Impressionism” Through 1/3/27: Fri–Mon and Wed, 11 AM–5 PM, Thu 11 AM–8 PM, Art Institute of Chicago , 111 S. Michigan
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