MULTIZ321
TUG Member
- Joined
- Jun 6, 2005
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ROYAL HOLIDAY CLUB RHC (POINTS)
The Independent Mary Cassatt
By Brian T. Allen/ Culture/ NR/ National Review/ nationalreview.com
"Working from Paris, she imbued her paintings of domestic life with an American sense of freedom and sheer fun.
For years, I had mixed feelings about Mary Cassatt (1844–1926). After seeing the new survey of her career at the Jacquemart-André Museum in Paris, I’m happy to say I was too hard on her. Superb curatorial vision, a good arrangement of art, and the thrill of so many fresh things, especially from European collections, changed my mind. It’s unusual both to be proven wrong and to feel happy about it.
Cassatt was the only American in the pivotal, nonconformist impressionist shows. She wasn’t there at the beginning, in their first show in 1874, but she joined soon enough, in 1879, and into the 1880s. Until Cassatt, only one other American — her friend James McNeil Whistler — had heralded a European avant-garde movement. I would have said she was a follower, though, not a leader, there in part because she was an assiduous networker and Edgar Degas’s best friend.
Cassatt became a gifted printmaker and pastelist with a sensitive, unusual take on women and children. The figures in her oil paintings, though, can be awkward, with limbs, heads, and torsos sometimes mismatched. Her paint surfaces remind me of cement on a sidewalk. That said, the paintings in the show are the best — no clunkers to be found.
The Jacquemart-André, Paris’s counterpart to the Gardner in Boston, is always a pleasure to visit. The show’s main curator is Nancy Matthews, the distinguished American art historian. No one knows Cassatt better, so when she speaks, everyone needs to listen. Cassatt is due for a reappraisal in Paris, too. Her critical reception there while she was alive was fine but never ecstatic......"
Little Girl in a Blue Armchair, 1877–78 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, Collection of Mr. And Mrs. Paul Mellon © Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington)
Richard
By Brian T. Allen/ Culture/ NR/ National Review/ nationalreview.com
"Working from Paris, she imbued her paintings of domestic life with an American sense of freedom and sheer fun.
For years, I had mixed feelings about Mary Cassatt (1844–1926). After seeing the new survey of her career at the Jacquemart-André Museum in Paris, I’m happy to say I was too hard on her. Superb curatorial vision, a good arrangement of art, and the thrill of so many fresh things, especially from European collections, changed my mind. It’s unusual both to be proven wrong and to feel happy about it.
Cassatt was the only American in the pivotal, nonconformist impressionist shows. She wasn’t there at the beginning, in their first show in 1874, but she joined soon enough, in 1879, and into the 1880s. Until Cassatt, only one other American — her friend James McNeil Whistler — had heralded a European avant-garde movement. I would have said she was a follower, though, not a leader, there in part because she was an assiduous networker and Edgar Degas’s best friend.
Cassatt became a gifted printmaker and pastelist with a sensitive, unusual take on women and children. The figures in her oil paintings, though, can be awkward, with limbs, heads, and torsos sometimes mismatched. Her paint surfaces remind me of cement on a sidewalk. That said, the paintings in the show are the best — no clunkers to be found.
The Jacquemart-André, Paris’s counterpart to the Gardner in Boston, is always a pleasure to visit. The show’s main curator is Nancy Matthews, the distinguished American art historian. No one knows Cassatt better, so when she speaks, everyone needs to listen. Cassatt is due for a reappraisal in Paris, too. Her critical reception there while she was alive was fine but never ecstatic......"
Little Girl in a Blue Armchair, 1877–78 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, Collection of Mr. And Mrs. Paul Mellon © Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington)
Richard