Between the known and the unknown: Exploring Mary Cassatt’s world at the Legion of Honor

As I stepped into the gallery at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, I found myself drawn into a world both familiar and elusive, mirroring the layers beneath Mary Cassatt’s brushstrokes that are being uncovered throughout the show. 

The Legion of Honor’s new special exhibition, “Mary Cassatt at Work,” marks the first major North American retrospective of the artist’s work in over 25 years. 

The exhibition features more than 100 works, including pieces from the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco’s permanent collection and rare loans from the National Gallery of Art, MFA Boston, the Art Institute of Chicago and various private collections. Organized both chronologically and thematically, the show highlights Cassatt’s technical evolution and the social worlds she inhabited and captured.

While commonly known for her portrayals of women engaged in domestic tasks and caregiving duties, this exhibition reveals many of the artist’s nuances. By sorting her work in a chronological framework with thematic details within each room, the show provides viewers with a comprehensive overview of her stylistic development.

The exhibit especially emphasizes Japonisme, the influence of Japanese wood print art on the French world, and Cassatt’s various experimentations with materials, such as sketches on brown paper, drypoints and etchings. Many of her later famous works came out of these experiments. Most notably “The Coiffure” (1891), was also included as a part of this exhibition.

One of the most captivating aspects of the exhibition is its exploration of Cassatt’s creative process. Her revisions and hidden details are made visible through imaging technology that can probe under the surface paints and reveal underlying brushstrokes. 

For instance, right next to painting “Maternal Caress” (1891) hangs an x-radiograph made at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It shows that Cassatt initially painted the child with a long sleeve but later erased it to emphasize the intimate skin-to-skin grasp between the child and the adult caregiver. 

However, there’s an essential question here: did Cassatt imagine that the areas she amended or concealed would one day be rediscovered, laid bare for modern viewers? While I have my reservations about modern technology’s intervention — or, in a way, intrusion — into art, I couldn’t help but wonder if exposing the back-and-forth amendments and scratches on the canvas might reduce such sacred aura of art. The complete uncovering of truth from a third-person perspective left me wondering whether Mary would have liked for us to see the unseen, to know the unknown. 

Perhaps it is slightly encroaching on her own artistic volition, as though we’re undoing a deliberate choice she made to conceal brushstrokes she didn’t wish to reveal.

At the exit of the exhibition, there is a short film that, once again, reinforces the theme of the known and unknown, as co-curators Jennifer Thompson and Laurel Garber remark that “Mary Cassatt — like her male counterparts — painted what was known to her.” 

I think this is particularly important to the thematic development of the show, recognizing that each of us has our own limitations in observing and addressing our surroundings. This is especially relevant given that critics have often placed Mary Cassatt in a political dialogue. While nearly unanimous in viewing her work as “feminine,” debates have arisen regarding whether her work can be seen as “feminist,” as critics have consistently characterized Cassatt’s work as a mundane recording of her bourgeois life. 

American art historian Edgar Richardson, for instance, once described Cassatt’s work as unimaginative and frivolous. 

“She offers us a circumscribed Jamesian world of well-bred ladies living lives of leisure, delighting in their dresses, their company, and their well-behaved children,” he wrote in an essay “Sophisticates and Innocence Abroad.” “Her art is that of a very conventional person living in the very conventional world…tea, clothes, and nursery; nursery, clothes, and tea.”

I am glad to see that the exhibition, curated by two female curators, gracefully addresses these political and overly simplified narratives surrounding the art of Mary Cassatt. While acknowledging how her art moved in sync with the societal progressions of French and American societies at the time, the curators emphasize the individuality of Cassatt’s narrative. 

I was especially moved by the exhibition’s inclusion of Lydia, Mary Cassatt’s beloved yet often historically overlooked sister, highlighted both in wall texts and through a thematic grouping of her portraits. Lydia, who suffered from a chronic illness and was mostly bedridden, passed away in 1882 — a loss that left Cassatt so devastated she couldn’t paint for six months. 

The exhibition beautifully captures, through its thematic categorization of artworks, how this profound grief shaped her later works, and by including these autobiographical elements, the show restores an intimate narrative to Cassatt’s work. The curators’ thoughtful decisions return the nuanced individuality and emotional depth that political framing often flattens.

To sing a radical song of her time, tenderly — this is how I would encapsulate the art of Mary Cassatt. This exhibition beautifully captures the essence of her work’s complex balance between maternal tenderness and the inherent strength of being a woman in her era. 

If you’re in San Francisco for a weekend, don’t miss the chance to visit this remarkable show at the Legion of Honor open until Jan. 26  — a rare invitation to step into Mary Cassatt’s world.

Editor’s Note: This article is a review and includes subjective thoughts, opinions and critiques.

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