Mary Cassatt: Being Independent - Musée d'Orsay - Paris
For the centenary of her death, the Musée d'Orsay presents Mary Cassatt: Being Independent, the first major exhibition devoted to the artist by a French national museum. A core figure of the Impressionist group, Cassatt lived in France for some sixty years while always considering herself a thoroughly American artist. The exhibition takes independence, the value she held above all others, as the lens for a fresh look at her life and work.
Nearly 80 paintings, pastels and prints trace her entire career, drawing on unpublished letters and on loans from European and American collections, several of them rarely seen outside the United States. Early portraits of family and friends show how her travels and her study of the Old Masters shaped her art, as she set up her own studio, hired professional models and built a career in a field dominated by men.
Her scenes of fashionable young women at home and at the theatre caught the eye at the Impressionist exhibitions, where she showed four times from 1879 at the invitation of Edgar Degas. Alongside her celebrated mothers and children, she took portrait commissions and advised American collectors, helping to bring Impressionism to the United States.
Later rooms follow her years at her château in the Oise, her lost mural Modern Woman for the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, presented through studies and a digital restoration, and her experimental Ten Color Prints. The exhibition closes with paintings from the 1915 New York show she organised with Louisine Havemeyer in support of women's suffrage. Go to Website
