Cassatt was born into a Pittsburgh banker’s family, and at 16 started taking classes at the renowned Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. At 21 she left America to study at the even more famous Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, only to find it didn’t admit women. Undaunted, Cassatt took private lessons from the heavyweight academician Jean-Leon Gerome, made the rounds of art colonies and had a painting accepted into the official salon exhibition of 1868. Her family persuaded her to come home during the Franco-Prussian War, but almost as soon as it was over, Cassatt was right back in Paris. She met Edgar Degas, who issued her a kind of “women can’t really paint, can they?” challenge. Cassatt answered with a picture of a girl putting up her hair that Degas traded a drawing for, and kept until he died. He invited Cassatt to become the only American in the group of artistic rebels who were calling themselves impressionists. “I agreed gladly,” Cassatt remarked later; “I hated conventional art.”
Hated conventional art? Mary Cassatt, portraitist of innumerable lovely young mothers and their cuddly babes? Convention–and unconvention–lie more in the way the art is made than in its content; painters of bourgeois family scenes can be as radical as those who paint orgies and outcasts. Cassatt, inspired by a Parisian exhibition of Japanese art in 1890, moved her domestic tableaux well beyond impressionism into a compositionally ingenious and emotionally deft kind of austere, stylized picture-making. She was especially inventive in her prints, and a set of 10 color etchings in her 1891 gallery show at Durand-Ruel knocked the French art world on its ear. Cassatt, who managed to make a lifelong living directly from her art, always kept several sets of prints for herself. But around 1906 she sold her entire collection to the avant-garde dealer Ambrose Vollard. Those prints stayed together in darkened drawers in Paris apartments–safe from greasy fingers and bleaching light–until the heirs of a subsequent owner recently decided to put them on the market. Adelson got the scoop and the show, which is a scholarly event enough to merit a catalog published by Princeton University Press.
On gallery walls today these Cassatt prints–some of the finest in the history of the craft–are as fresh and exquisitely startling as the day they came off the press. On the printing plate–that is, with a big needle carving into a piece of copper–Cassatt could draw better than anyone in the world, even Degas. In “The Fitting” (1891), her line is effortlessly spare and graceful where she desires quiet in the composition, and flickering in the spots where she wants to bring the surface to life. Cassatt also employs the most incorrectly convincing anatomy this side of Ingres. In “The Bath” (1891), for example, the right arm is too short and the angle of the woman’s knee pretty improbable. But the total effect–Cassatt’s psychological rightness–would be impossible without the distortions. If that’s not enough, her color (applied by hand to the plate, and endlessly adjusted one proof at a time) is a marvel of mood and nuance. “… Adorable blues, fresh rose… and it’s done with printer’s ink!” the impressionist painter Camille Pissarro enthusiastically wrote in a letter at the time. Now, more than a century after they were made, Cassatt’s prints constitute the most eye-opening exhibition of the fall. In its own delicate way, the show is a real fireball.
