The Honolulu Museum of Art (HoMA) showcases the only American included among the French Impressionists, in Mary Cassatt at Work, on view June 21st-October 12th. The exhibition invites visitors on a captivating journey through Cassatt’s six-decade career with 30 paintings, pastels and prints along with the famed artist’s personal correspondence that offer insight into her experiences making a living through art. A visually radical artist, she helped shape the Impressionist movement and transformed the course of modern art, using materials and processes that pushed the creative boundaries of her era.
Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) was among the leading figures of the French Impressionist movement and the most celebrated woman artist of her time. Born in Pittsburgh to a well-to-do family, she attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts when she was just 15. In 1866, chaperoned by her mother, she moved to Paris to study privately. Edgar Degas, with whom she became close friends, invited her to exhibit with the Impressionists in 1879, marking a turning point for Cassatt. She contributed to four of the Impressionists’ famed group exhibitions and became an ambassador for the movement in the United States. Cassatt maintained a professional practice, exhibiting and selling her works. Over the course of her career, she produced approximately 380 pastels, 320 paintings and 215 prints. She painted her final pictures in 1915 and showed a group of them at an exhibition in New York supporting women’s suffrage, a cause she supported in her later years. She was forced to stop painting as she went progressively blind.
Methods
Mary Cassatt at Work explores the artist’s activity across media, revealing the daring methods she used to give form to her ideas. Among the objects on view in the exhibition are eight works from HoMA’s collection. Featuring prints, pastels and oils, HoMA’s collection underscores her enduring commitment to innovation. HoMA’s relationship with Cassatt dates to the Museum’s founding. In addition to eight works from HoMA’s collection, the exhibition includes 22 objects on loan from the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
“Mary Cassatt has been a part of the museum since it opened in 1927,” said HoMA director and CEO Halona Norton-Westbrook. “Just as the Honolulu Museum of Art shares the best of Hawai‘i’s art with the world, for almost 100 years it has also been bringing the world to Hawai‘i. It is a wonderful parallel to celebrate the work of a groundbreaking female artist at a museum that was founded by an equally forward-thinking woman.”
Cassatt’s The Banjo Lesson (1893) was among the core group of works gifted to the museum by founder Anna Rice Cooke. The drypoint, considered modern for that era, reflects the popularity of banjo playing among middle- and upper-class women of that time. In The Child’s Caress, (1891) a tender moment between mother and child highlights the female role of nurturer and primary caretaker.
Cassatt is best known for her depictions of women and children. Mary Cassatt at Work offers a serious window into the social, intellectual, domestic and working lives of women and delves into issues of class, rarely discussed when examining Cassatt’s work. The exhibition also explores Cassatt’s role in bringing to the forefront the “invisible work” of women, making it a perceptible, serious object of study. Her work highlights roles traditionally assigned to women, including caregiving, nursing, social labor and performing music. Cassatt meticulously presents these roles through intimate marks of her brush, etching needle, pastel stick and fingertips.
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Image: Mary Cassatt, “Driving,” 1881. Oil on canvas. Philadelphia Museum of Art: Purchased with the W. P. Wilstach Fund, W1921-1-1
