Mary Cassatt

But I, I think the term narrative art, again, just to go back, it's specific, but I also find it quite expansive.

Like, when you first hear it, you think about film, illustration, comics, you know? But it also cover a ton of work, you know, Mary Cassatt's painting of mothers, Frida Kahlo's self-portrait.

You know, it's harder to think of art that doesn't tell a story, I feel.

Yeah.

Sure, yeah.

The Frida Kahlo self-portrait is across the, uh, comics gallery, so there are some interesting juxtapositions there, and I think it goes to what's Lucas's mission of celebrating illustrators who are often, you know, overlooked.

They deserve to be on the museum wall next to a Picasso, next to a Mary Cassatt, you know? And the museum does have an introductory gallery with an exhibition called The History of Narrative Art, where it takes you through-

Okay

Sometimes it's techniques, sometimes the struggles we all have as artists and sometimes like today we take a little trip back through art history.

Today we're doing another Meet the Masters and we're heading back to the 1800s to meet an artist I've really enjoyed learning more about, Mary Cassatt.

Now if you know Cassatt's work, you probably know her for her beautiful paintings of mothers and children.

But what particularly interested me was her pastel work.

I suddenly feel like I have to finish everything.

So the more I look at Cassatt's work the more I realise there are some really useful lessons here for those of us painting today and not just pastel artists.

So today we're going to learn a little bit about Mary Cassatt but more importantly we're going to look at her as artists ourselves.

What can we learn from the way she worked? So who was Mary Cassatt? Mary Cassatt was born in Pennsylvania in 1844 into a fairly well-to-do family.

He's not one of the great American artists.

Mary Cassatt, who came out of Pittsburgh, is one of the great American artists and impressionists who mostly did portraits.

But Gorson is one of America's leading painters of industrial landscapes.

And I would say in Pennsylvania, he is the leading painter of industrial landscapes.

Today, we're rethinking everything we thought we knew about Mary Cassatt.

In her book, Cassatt Reconsidered, our guest Mary G. Morton makes this case for an artist who was bold, modern, and uncompromising.

and whose true radicalism has been overlooked for far too long.

Today we have a special guest joining us on the World of Art Show, as you know, hosted by Victoria Chick, who's a contemporary figurative artist, an art historian, a collector of early 19th and 20th century prints, and also the spearhead behind the project of creating the Southwest Regional Museum of Art and Art Center in Silver City, New Mexico.

So you can learn more about Victoria, as always, at victoriachick.com.

But today, we're going to be talking about the artist Mary Cassatt.

And I think it was like 10, maybe 15 years ago that Victoria was on the show talking about her and wrote an article.

We've done so much on women and artists, pretty amazing, their stories.

The subject, as well as the treatment, is as different as can be imagined from that of Mrs. McMoney's.

Miss Cassatt has chosen the modern woman, and has tried to represent the fashions of the day as accurately and as much in detail as possible.

The subject of the central and largest composition is young women plucking the fruits of knowledge and science, and this enabled placing of the figures out of doors and allowed of brilliancy of color.

The occasion being one of rejoicing, a great national fete, the general effect has been made as bright and amusing as possible.

Let's give our art lovers some fun news, Cassie.

There's a new exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago celebrating Impressionist Mary Cassatt.

What should we expect to see?

Well, I think Cassatt is often thought of as sort of the woman who was in the avant-garde boys club of impressionism.

Manet and Van Gogh and Whistler and all these different people.

And Mary Cassatt was very much taken with the works of Utamaro, who was an artist who was known for his bijinga, which bijinga are beautiful women.

So the idea of creating these portraits of women who either existed or were archetypes, or so they might be famous courtesans or they might be the idea of a woman and so Mary Cassatt takes a lot of that iconography and translates it from a female perspective so she inserts a more domestic sensibility and this image in particular uses the idea of the nape of the neck and the back was seen as like as a specific area of beauty within the female figure um within uh the prince of a tomorrow and other people um but what's fantastic is a you can see the influences not only in that composition but in the flatness that mary cassatt uses so

and it's interesting because obviously the influence is from woodblock but yes

this is all in taglio yeah So you have this beautiful carpet, we'll say, that doesn't really bear much relation to what you might expect.

They bite further and further into the plates.

You get areas of, um, of different levels of shading and then using a technique called a la poupe, which is when you use, um, It basically means with a doll and you use this little fabric covered mounds that you then use different colours and you put it on the plate and then that goes through the press.

But, you know, Mary Cassatt was a fantastic artist.

In the 1950s, along with London, Paris was undoubtedly one of the most popular vacation destinations.

It also became a common second home for American expats, particularly artists and writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and James Baldwin, Josephine Baker, and Mary Cassatt.

Oh yeah, and Ysa Sarah Kanye.

And Jerry.

...

Mary Cassatt or a Degas?"

Mm-hmm.

I- immediately it registers, like, "Oh yeah, okay," you know?