Philadelphia Museum of Art
The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
(October 5, 2024-January 26, 2025)
The Philadelphia Museum of Art is thrilled to present Mary Cassatt at Work, the first large-scale exhibition of the artist’s work in the U.S. in a quarter century. The exhibition will run from May 18 through September 8, 2024.
Pennsylvania-born and a celebrated member of the French Impressionists, Mary Cassatt built a groundbreaking career through hard work and artistic vision. For six decades, Cassatt was a committed, professional artist, making the social, intellectual, and working lives of modern women a core subject of her prints, paintings, and pastels. She once wrote: “Oh the dignity of work, give me the chance of earning my own living, five francs a day and self-respect.”
Mary Cassatt at Work will present over 130 of her works in various media to show her evolving practice as an artist and demonstrate her commitment to the “serious work” of artmaking. It will present new findings about her materials and working methods—which were advanced and radical for her era—based on detailed technical studies of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s significant Cassatt holdings.
“Art was Mary Cassatt’s life’s purpose and living,” said Sasha Suda, the George D. Widener Director and CEO of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “This exhibition will focus on Cassatt’s professionalism, her biography, and the wider Parisian world she inhabited. It’s my hope that this exhibition will reshape contemporary conversations about gender, work, and artistic agency.”
Mary Cassatt at Work will feature works from the PMA’s extensive collection, including some of Cassatt’s most celebrated paintings and prints, as well as loans from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Viginia Museum of Fine Arts, and private collections.
“We hope visitors come away with a sense of who Cassatt was and how carefully she constructed her identity as a working artist,” said curators Jennifer A. Thompson, The Gloria and Jack Drosdick Curator of European Painting and Sculpture and Curator of the John G. Johnson Collection, and Laurel Garber, The Park Family Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings. “With this exhibition, we’ve sought to reexamine the full breadth of Cassatt’s art through the lens of her creative enterprise and draw attention to her commitment to ceaseless experimentation and bold techniques."
Mary Cassatt at Work opens on May 18, 2024, and will be on view until September 8, 2024. A multimedia tour will be available, featuring audio, images, and videos. . Following its run at the PMA, this exhibition will travel to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Legion of Honor.
Catalogue
A new study of Mary Cassatt that explores the centrality of work to both her inventive technical practice and her distinctive approach to modern subjects
Mary Cassatt's (1844-1926) sensitive depictions of the social, intellectual, and professional lives of modern women often emphasize the work involved in the undervalued sphere of feminized activity. From her renowned portrayals of women and children that foreground the labor of caregiving--whether performed by hired help or mothers--to her images of embroidering, theatergoing, and reading, her female subjects are actively engaged, and often engrossed, in what they are doing.Highlighting Cassatt's attention to women's roles in the making of modern life, this study connects her recurring subjects and rigorous techniques to her own understanding of her status as a professional artist. Rather than inspiration, genius, or sentiment, it was intense effort that Cassatt most identified with in her processes of pastel drawing, intaglio printmaking, and oil painting, which resulted in an ever-evolving style that left the labors of art-making visible. Drawing on previously unpublished letters, Cassatt family correspondence, and groundbreaking insights from technical examination of her works, Mary Cassatt at Work places the artist's carefully constructed professional identity within the wider social contexts of Parisian modernity.Images
