Mary Cassatt At Work

San Francisco's Legion of Honor Museum is currently hosting an exhibit called Mary Cassatt At Work. It's an overview of the pioneering American feminist artist Mary Cassatt (1844-1926). She was born into a wealthy Pennsylvania family and managed to overcome innnumerable obstacles to becoming a working woman artist of the 19th century. One of those obstacles was her stockbroker father who refused to support her in her studies, which started at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts when she was 15. (Pictured is Little Girl in a Blue Armchair, 1878.)

She hated the dreary instruction and gender discrimination at the Academy (no live models for you, girl!) and decamped to Paris with her mother, who fiercely supported her daughter. She took private lessons from teachers at the Ecole de Beaux Arts because women were not allowed to actually attend the school. (Pictured is Portrait of Mrs. Robert S. Cassatt, The Artist's Mother, 1885.)

Mary bounced back and forth between Europe and Pennsylvania until finally moving permanently to Paris in 1874, with some of her family in tow, and she became a working artist. (Pictured is In The Loge, 1878.)

She had several paintings accepted to the prestigious annual Salon, but grew disenchanted with the sexist selection process and their stodgy aesthetics. (Pictured is Woman in a Loge, 1879.)

She fell in love with some pastels in an art gallery window by Edgar Degas, and the two artists soon became fruitful, friendly collaborators in oil painting, pastel drawing, and printmaking. (Pictured is At the Theater, 1879.)

She joined the plein air Impressionists, which was once a radical art movement before it became ridiculously popular in the 20th century. (Pictured is Woman at her Toilette, 1880.)

Cassatt was well represented in the famous 1879 Impressionism exhibit, and with the proceeds of her sales bought single paintings by Monet and Degas. (Pictured is A Goodnight Hug, 1880.)

Her subject matter from that time forward was almost invariably depictions of women and children. (Pictured is Children Playing on a Beach, 1885.)

They are not formal portraits because none of the women or children are ever looking at the artist or the viewer. It was also interesting to read that many of the doting mothers were actually models with borrowed babies. Cassatt never married or had children but she obviously had a fascination for the subject of womanhood and maternity. (Pictured is A Kiss for Baby Ann, No. 3, 1897).

While her brother Alexander became president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, Mary used her connections with American society friends to advise them on purchasing Impressionist works. Cassatt insisted the art should eventually be donated to American art museums, which is how New York's MOMA ended up with so many priceless Impressionist paintings. She also became a major supporter of the American suffragette movement. (Pictured is the only work depicting males in the current exhibit, Portrait of Alexander J. Cassatt and His Son Robert Kelso Cassatt, 1884.)

Cassatt's own tastes grew a bit stodgy after the 1890s and she rejected the crazy new movements of the 20th century like Cubism, Fauvism and Post-Impressionism. In 1910, she visited Egypt for the first time, and proclaimed "I fought against it but it conquered, it is surely the greatest Art the past has left us ... how are my feeble hands to ever paint the effect on me?"