Mary Cassatt at Work at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

From October 5, 2024 to January 26, 2025, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco will present “Mary Cassatt at Work”, a major loan exhibition focused on the great woman Impressionist.

Source: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco · Image: Mary Cassatt, Little Girl in a Blue Armchair, 1877–1878. Oil on canvas, 35 1/4 x 51 in. (89.5 x 129.5 cm). National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, 1983.1.18

The exhibition presents Mary Cassatt (1844–1926) as a fiercely professional artist and an aesthetically radical painter, pastelist, and printmaker who helped shape the French Impressionist movement and transformed the course of modern art. Cassatt produced images of “women’s work”—knitting and needlepoint, bathing children, nursing infants—that also testify to the work of the woman who made them: the marks of her brush, etching needle, pastel stick, and even fingertips. Juxtaposing paintings, pastels, and prints, Mary Cassatt at Work will explore the artist’s activity across media, revealing the daring, iterative methods she used to give form to her ideas. In addition to 120 objects on loan from institutions including the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the exhibition will present a group of distinguished works–including Cassatt’s magisterial oil portrait of her mother plus two recently acquired pastels–from the Fine Arts Museums’ collection. The first North American retrospective of Cassatt’s work in 25 years, this exhibition’s sole West Coast venue will be the Legion of Honor.

“Mary Cassatt at Work disrupts any preconceived notion that Cassatt was a sentimental painter and sheds fresh light on her groundbreaking practice,” remarked Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. “It is fitting that this exhibition, which celebrates Cassatt’s daring and modernity, will open our yearlong centennial celebration of the Legion of Honor. The Legion of Honor was cofounded in 1924 by another intrepid female pioneer, Alma de Bretteville Spreckels, who shared Cassatt’s deep attachment to French culture and bold vision for the future of art in America.”