The first North American retrospective of Mary Cassatt’s work in 25 years is currently on view at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor.
The Legion is the sole West Coast venue for exhibition, which presents Mary Cassatt (1844–1926) as a fiercely professional artist and an aesthetically radical painter, pastelist, and printmaker.
According to the curator, Cassatt also helped shape the French Impressionist movement and transformed the course of modern art.
Cassatt produced images of “women’s work”—knitting and needlepoint, bathing children, nursing infants—that also testify to the work of the woman who made them: the marks of her brush, etching needle, pastel stick, and even fingertips. Juxtaposing paintings, pastels, and prints, Mary Cassatt at Work will explore the artist’s activity across media, revealing the daring, iterative methods she used to give form to her ideas.
In addition to 93 objects on loan from institutions including the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the exhibition will present a group of distinguished works–including Cassatt’s magisterial oil portrait of her mother and recently acquired pastels–from the Fine Arts Museums’ collection.
We were especially impressed by “In the Loge” (1878), a work influenced by Edgar Degas, who was a man of fiercely anti-feminist sensibilities…but a friend nonetheless.