Randuwa II: Philadelphia Museum of Art: Mary Cassatt At Work

Monday, August 19, 2024

Philadelphia Museum of Art: Mary Cassatt At Work

This is my first Mary Cassatt retrospective. How delightful!

When I think of her art, I am immediately surrounded by images of women and women with children. She took the Madonna and Child motif and secularized the hell out of it! Her work is a little hard to pin down. She definitely embraces the whole impressionist vibe when it comes to the essential ethos of her work. They exude a sense of calm and serenity--it's palpable, and that's perhaps the biggest part of her magic.

Because technically, she is not a naturally talented artist. Her sense of perspective is at times bizarre. Her grasp of anatomy can be awkward, and yet she nearly always ameliorates this aspect of her art with compositional prowess. In these aspects, she wasn't out of step with her contemporaries: most notably Gustave Caillebotte and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Yet you love her still because her genius doesn't rely on these elements.

One of the things that really came home to me in this exhibition was her multi-medium expertise. Cassatt was equally wedded to creating works in Oil, Pastel, and Etching. On some level I was aware of her works in each of these arenas, but seeing so many of them together with the opportunity to 1) witness her evolution, and 2) compare her skill across all three. I have to say that of all three, I was least enamored of her oil paintings, and utterly mesmerized by her pastel works.

As to Cassatt's prints, the exhibit takes great pains to include not only a wide range of works, but a few that illustrate the multiply layered steps from first to last in the process of Drypoint, Soft-Ground-Etching, and Aquatint. I always love it when I learn something new about art in general while experiencing an Artist specific exhibition. I did count the number of works, but I would guess there were 125 works altogether. The collections of almost all of the major American Art Museums were represented. From Philadelphia the exhibition travels to San Francisco's Fine Art Museum at the Legion of Honor.

SELECTED OILS