The Musée d'Orsay opens "Mary Cassatt: The Choice of Independence" on Tuesday, the first exhibition in France devoted entirely to the American painter who became one of the few women admitted into the inner circle of French Impressionism. The show, which runs through Jan. 31, arrives a century after Cassatt's death in 1926 and brings together nearly 80 paintings, pastels and prints, many drawn from museums and private collections that rarely lend to Europe.
The retrospective was organized with London's National Portrait Gallery and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, a collaboration curators built specifically to compensate for how seldom Cassatt's work has crossed the Atlantic, despite the fact that she spent most of her working life in France. Born in Pittsburgh in 1844 to a well-off family, she settled permanently in Paris in her twenties, training outside the rigid academic system that barred women from most formal instruction.
A Career Built on Defiance
The exhibition's subtitle, "The Choice of Independence," points to the decision that defined Cassatt's career: rather than pursue the conventional, officially sanctioned Salon path expected of a woman painter of her era, she aligned herself with Edgar Degas and the Impressionists, who were then operating well outside the establishment. Degas, struck by her work, invited her to exhibit alongside Monet, Renoir and Camille Pissarro beginning in 1879. She and Berthe Morisot were the only women to show regularly with the group.
Cassatt built her reputation on intimate, closely observed scenes of women and children, a subject matter dismissed by many of her contemporaries as minor but one she treated with unusual formal rigor, borrowing compositional devices from Japanese woodblock prints that were just then becoming known in Paris. The Musée d'Orsay show traces that development across six decades, from her early Salon-influenced portraits through her mature Impressionist work and into the drier, more linear prints she produced later in her career after failing eyesight curtailed her painting.
She never married, supported herself entirely through her art and used her position within a wealthy American expatriate circle to encourage early collectors, including her friend Louisine Havemeyer, to buy Impressionist works that would eventually anchor major American museum collections. Historians of the period have long credited Cassatt with shaping American taste for Impressionism as much through her advocacy as her own canvases.
"The Choice of Independence" runs at the Musée d'Orsay through January, overlapping with the museum's broader winter season, before the question of whether any of its loans will travel further remains open; organizers have not announced additional venues beyond the initial partnership with the National Portrait Gallery and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
