Cassatt Reconsidered: Mary G. Morton on the Artist Behind the Label

Yeah, I mean, the misconception of this artist is striking and even staggering, I would say.

You know, people that are kind of familiar with Renoir, there's a lot of misconceptions there, too.

Monet, Cezanne, Van Gogh, I mean, but Cassatt, as I write, you know, she really did get put in this very circumscribed box.

And so just busting her out, I will say that this is not original.

This is not, I mean, I'm not like coming up with this on my own.

Scholars have known that certain scholars have known who Cassatt was and what she contributed to French modernism.

And it was a major monographic show, the first ever in the United States.

in 98 and it came out of Chicago went to Boston and then came to the gallery and the great art historian Linda Nochlin the feminist art historian wrote in the New York Review of Books okay um now we you know now hopefully the record is set straight on Cassatt and what she what she did yet I think that it you know it just has slid away again and I get into reasons for that in the book but I go out I talk to people what you know what do you think of Mary Cassatt you know oh Well, I think she might have been an Impressionist.

I think she was American, but maybe she lived in France.

And then the other thing, number one, 99%, I would even say 100%, what image comes to mind when you think of Mary Cassatt? 99%, mothers and babies.

mothers and children.

And that is an extraordinary motif in her work.

And she did much more in the way of representing the lived experience of women in the late 19th century.

So it's a bigger story than just the maternities.

And I'm afraid, as I lay out in the book, that her association with paintings of motherhood did not set her well in the heroic story of modernism that was written across the 20th century.

And so it ends up sort of, you know, it does very well for her in terms of sales during her life.

But I'm afraid that in the great story, because she pictured something that the men who were running the official art world deemed maybe not a serious subject matter, she just didn't make it into the pantheon.

Well, you know, when I was taking art history in college, my professor brought up Bernard Berenson.

And he wasn't too kind about Bernard Berenson because it seemed that he was such an authority in people's minds that nobody dared say anything that he hadn't said.

And so I think sometimes, I think of Mary Cassatt as being kind of trapped by that, by previous writers.

And then some people are too lazy to do research.

But I envy you because you're able to see and have seen an amazing number of Cassatt artworks.

I'm attracted to her because of her compositional organization.

An artist.

Absolutely.