You would be forgiven to suppose, as I did until recently, that the impressionist painter Mary Cassatt was French. After all, she spent most of her life in Paris, where she fell with a group of French pioneers whom she often called “our set” – Pierre -Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet and her close friend Edgar Degas among them. In 1894, she was appointed by art critic Henri Focillon as one of the “the three great ladies” (“the three great ladies”) of impressionism, as well as the French painters Berthe Morisot and Marie Bracquemond. But the Cassatt born in Pittsburgh – who moved to France in 1874 at the age of 30 and spent the rest of his life – was forever an American in Paris, said Ruth E. Iskin in his new book Mary Cassatt between Paris and New York: the manufacture of a transatlantic heritage.
“I am American, clearly and frankly American,” said Cassatt first biographer After having lived in France for almost four decades. Although she rarely returns to the United States, making only three trips home in 52 years, Cassatt was not an expatriate. She was a fervent supporter of the Women's Suffrage Movement in the United States and worked closely with American collectors to fulfill her mission for life to bring contemporary French art to the emerging museums of the nation. Iskin therefore considers Cassatt as a clearly transatlantic artist, whose strong identification with the United States and prominence in the world of French art were deeply linked.
In this meticulously studied and rigorously argued book, Iken depicts his subject as an ambitious and wise woman who, despite societal constraints, exercised a remarkable agency on her trajectory. At the beginning of the twenty, she dared to leave the security of her upper middle -class family home to continue an artistic education in Europe. His move to Paris was strategic: the city offered unrivaled opportunities to share its work, find patronage and establish links. Cassatt would become the only American to exhibit with the Impressionists – which, according to Iskin, is the result of the “explicit networking of the artist” and not of his “discovery of chance” of Degas, as claimed by certain scholars. She also points out that Cassatt was the peer of Degas, not her protégé. Despite the virulent misogyny of Degas, even he could not help admiring the work of Cassatt, expressing a particular reverence for his tender painting of 1899 “The oval mirror (mother and child)”, which evokes images of yield of the Virgin and the Child.
Cassatt's friendship with the art collector and New York suffragist, Louisine Havemeyer – a link that has proven to be important for American museums and politics, not to mention the “longest, longest and most important” life in Cassatt's life. Iskin meticulously exploits the correspondence of the two women, a large unprecedented part. From Paris, Cassatt helped Havemeyer to bring together an exceptional collection of impressionist art, which she bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1929. And at the request of Cassatt, Havemeyer became a leading activist for the suffrage of women, the co -founding of the National Women's Party in 1913 and the staging of major demonstrations.
Cassatt, too, was a first feminist whose politics was at the heart of his art, who challenged the perceptions of older women and stressed Women's roles As mentors and educators. Although she has never been married or had children, choosing to devote her life to art, Cassatt has become extremely associated with his representations of domesticity, which constitute only part of her work. Iskin highlights the cosmopolitan sensitivity which also crosses a large part of his work: in a rare self -portrait, for example, painted in 1878 just before Cassatt's first exhibition with the Impressionist group, the artist describes himself as a “woman who belongs to the metropolis”. But Iskin bypasses Hagiography to represent a complicated figure: as a young woman, for example, Cassatt said that she “wanted to paint better that the ancient masters ”; Later in life, in a letter to art critic Roger Marx, she doubted that women could be great artists.
However, whether she thought it or not, Cassatt herself was a great artist. On this front, Iskin leaves no room for doubt. She injects a new perspective and important nuances in the heritage of Cassatt, while affirming her singular place in the history of art: as a leading impressionist, a woman pioneer artist and an American Parisian whose influence was covering an ocean.
Mary Cassatt between Paris and New York the manufacture of a transatlantic heritage (2025) by Ruth E. Iskin is published by the University of California and is available online and via independent booksellers.
