Imagine yourself in Paris the spring of 1879, on the Avenue de l’Opera, walking into the fourth group exhibit by the Impressionist artists.
Picking up the show’s catalog, you would see the already-familiar names of Messieurs Degas, Monet and Pissarro. Then a newcomer: “Mlle. Cassatt.” That would be Mary Cassatt, the 29-year-old Pennsylvania-born artist. She was the first American invited to exhibit with the Impressionists and one of the few women to gain that distinction.
She would become renowned as one of the great American artists, even though– or maybe because — she spent most of the rest of her life outside the United States.
“After all give me France,” she would write. “Women do not have to fight for recognition here if they do serious work.”
That serious work, including paintings from her Paris debut, is on view in “Mary Cassatt at Work,” a modest but wide-ranging exhibit at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor museum running through Jan. 26.
The exhibit includes several of the oil paintings and pastels that Cassatt (1844-1926) showed at the 1879 show, a success for her and other artists. Her father, in Paris at the time, wrote home, “She is now known to the art world as well as to the general public.”
In that era, American women were not expected to advance beyond the level of talented amateur artists. But Cassatt trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia (where Thomas Eakins was a fellow student.) She persuaded her father to let her study in Europe. She took lessons from the famous Jean-Leon Gerome in Paris and studied on her own in Italy and Spain.
The Legion of Honor exhibit subtitle, “At Work,” refers in part to the rigorous, professional process displayed in Cassatt’s oil paintings, pastels, engravings, drawings and sketches. Her method can be seen, for instance, in the 11 stages of one of her most famous Japanese-inspired prints, “The Bath.”
The exhibit’s subtitle also reflects what curator Emily Beeny describes as “women’s work” such as knitting, bathing children and nursing infants. Cassatt, she says, was “smuggling a radical aesthetic program under cover of acceptably ‘feminine’ subject matter.”
“Unlike her male counterparts,” wrote art historian Nancy Frazier, “Cassatt portrayed women as individuals in their own, independent, female worlds.”
Those beloved paintings and prints of mothers and children were almost too successful. By the 20th century Cassatt’s paintings were better known as Mother’s Day cards than as fine art. It’s a dilemma she faced in her own lifetime.
“When she was young and showed her adorable paintings of motherhood, no compliment irritated her more than ‘One can feel that you’re a woman!’ She wished to be an artist exclusively.” That was the recollection of art agent Augusto Jaccaci, quoted in Berkeley author Jeffrey Meyers’ “Impressionist Quartet.”
There’s no doubt the images are touching, and the Legion of Honor show includes a full measure, from the glowing “Maternal Caress” to the austere “Family Group Reading” (both 1899.) Cassatt achieved a palpable maternal bond even though the mothers depicted were usually paid models and the children borrowed from friends and family.
These works are filled with personality and atmosphere, but so charming that viewers may not realize the artist’s challenge. Children posing quietly for a portrait? Not then, or now. One caption points out that the delightful “Children Playing on the Beach” was most likely one little girl painted twice in Cassatt’s studio, where she kept a supply of toys for playthings.
Cassatt’s brother and nephew posed for the evocative “Portrait of Alexander J. Cassatt and His Son Robert Kelso Cassatt” when Robert was 10 or 11 years old. It was difficult to capture the boy successfully, the artist said, “since he was wriggling about like a flea.”
Her family members were often her models. There is a somber profile, “Mrs. Robert Cassatt, the Artist’s Mother,” her own arrangement in gray and black recalling Whistler. In contrast, her sister Lydia modeled for the dazzling and surprisingly modern looking “Woman With a Pearl Necklace in a Loge.”
Another painting with a theatrical setting, “In the Loge” depicts a woman surveying the crowd with her opera glasses while in the background a man studies her with his opera glasses. “The viewer, who sees them both, completes the circle,” notes a curator from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, where the painting was first shown in 1878. It was Cassatt’s first Impressionist painting displayed in the United States.
The big, stunning “Little Girl in a Blue Armchair” has more going on than the title suggests. Cassatt’s friend and mentor Edgar Degas worked on it with her, especially on the moody background. The girl is not seated primly for a portrait but sprawled in the chair, her skirt revealing her petticoats. Maybe she’s bored and restless from posing.
Two small prints hint at Cassatt’s most expansive work, a 58-foot-wide mural titled “Modern Woman” painted to be installed in the Women’s Building at the Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago. (It’s considered lost, possibly destroyed.)
The mural originally faced some criticism that the women depicted were too modern. And where were the men? Cassatt responded: She knew there would be plenty of men, in plenty of murals, in other world’s fair buildings.
‘MARY CASSATT AT WORK’
Through: Jan. 26
Where: Legion of Honor, Lincoln Park, 34th Avenue and Clement Street, San Francisco
Hours: 9:30 a.m.-5:15 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday
Admission: $15-$35; famsf.org
