Mary Cassatt, on the Outside Looking in

“Mary Cassatt: Prints and Drawings from the Collection of Ambroise Vollard,” on view at Adelson Galleries beginning Friday, is an amazing opportunity for anyone who’s not quite figured out that Mary Cassatt wasn’t just a great woman artist, the creator of classy greeting-card images, or some rich American hanger-on of the Impressionists, but, quite simply, one of the greatest artists of the last 200 years. The legendary dealer Vollard acquired in its entirety Mary Cassatt’s own collection of her works on paper. These passed to collector-dealer Henri Petiet, who arranged with dealer Marc Rosen to exhibit them. In conjunction with Adelson, this is Mr. Rosen’s third and last exhibition from this collection since 2000, each featuring works never before publicly exhibited.Mary Cassatt was born in Allegheny City, Pa. — now part of Pittsburgh — in 1844. She studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts before continuing her training in France, where she would remain for most of the last 61 years of her life. But she never gave up her American citizenship, and in her lifetime became one of her native country’s most beloved artists. In the late 1860s and 1870s, she regularly had works accepted for exhibition at the Salon. She thoroughly mastered the academic technique of the day — something few of the Impressionists, with whom she would later align herself, could claim. One of the few who could, Edgar Degas, invited Cassatt, whose experimental feints in the Impressionist direction had begun to alienate the Salon juries, to join the Impressionists in 1877. For all the American artists in Paris, Cassatt was and would remain the only American to participate in the Impressionist exhibitions. She first appeared with them at their fourth annual exhibition, in 1879. In that year she also made her first prints, and would continue as a printmaker until well into the 20th century. She learned much about printmaking from Whistler and Degas, though the style and technique she evolved were in the end wholly her own. At Adelson, “Drawing for ‘Lady in Black, in a Loge, Facing Right'” dates from 1879-80. It vividly showcases her consummate skill in pencil drawing, but also, by her command of light, her skill in producing drawings that could, as we also see here, translate perfectly to soft-ground etching.No American artist, ever, had or has been so fully accepted by the French as one of their own. By the time of Cassatt’s participation in the last Impressionist exhibition, in 1886, the avant-garde had moved on. It was two years later that she began her series of paintings and prints of mothers and children. We are so used to these images that some people no longer perceive their artistic greatness, but Cassatt’s painting and printmaking from around 1890 on belongs in anyone’s canon of the greatest art of the Western world. She seamlessly synthesized the rigorous academic training she had received in the 1870s with the radical impulses of the new art in such a way as to make one wonder why the two were ever so fiercely at each other’s throats. She also was a master of pastel, influenced by, and equaling the brilliance of, the 18th-century French master of the medium, Maurice Quentin de La Tour. (Ever the historian and haunter of galleries, she learned from past artists who were all but forgotten in her time.)Paul Durand-Ruel sponsored Cassatt’s first solo show in Paris in 1891. In addition to paintings, that show included 10 color prints. She used drypoint, aquatint, and etching in innovative combination, and sought effects like those of ukiyo-e woodblock prints — only better, with finer line and more varied color. It took her a year to produce 25 prints of each of the 10 images, but the result was one of the greatest artistic and technical feats of printmaking in history.Much in the Adelson show comes from around this time. “The Bath” (1890-91), combining drypoint, etching, and aquatint, appears here in 10 of its 17 states showing the painstaking laying-up of the sublimely soft colors. “In the Omnibus” (1890-91) is a masterpiece. The mother, at right with her baby on her lap, is a marvel in the way that, though her head is deeply bowed, the artist keeps the pitch just right for the features — eyes, nose, mouth, cheeks — to register fully. To the mother’s right sits her maid, who peers to her left at the same angle as does the baby, as though they are looking at the same thing — yet with a world of differences in their contrasting visages. “The Lamp” (1890-91) shows, from the back, a seated pensive woman, yet, again as always, her head is pitched just right to render her physiognomy complete. The scene evokes the compaction of Japanese woodblock prints, but the serene colors make the space anything but claustrophobic. A dark-ink drypoint such as “The Mirror” (c. 1891) makes one think that Cassatt’s intent rendering of psychology in mothers’ and children’s faces was only possible because she herself was not a mother. People make much of the narrowness of Cassatt’s subject range, how familiar it all was to her. But she is most often on the outside looking in.From the mid-1890s on, Cassatt’s art grew more conservative just as French art was going wilder. In part this may have been a result of Cassatt’s deep immersion in art history as she helped her dear friend Louisine Havemeyer build her stupendous, encyclopedic collection (which we can now enjoy at the Metropolitan Museum of Art). In “The Crocheting Lesson” (c. 1902) we see mother’s and daughter’s faces as classic, as complete, and as true as any in art. By this point, nothing is lost on Cassatt. But by the time Matisse was in the ascendant, Cassatt represented not merely the old guard, but deliberate regression, seemingly back to the old masters. That was short-lived, however. By the beginning of World War I, cataracts had taken away most of her eyesight. Still vigorous, if unable any longer to be a visual artist, she, like Edith Wharton, remained in France throughout the war, performing humanitarian deeds and otherwise aiding the French cause.The Adelson show has a rich story to tell of Cassatt, Vollard, and Petiet; instructs us in the art and craft of printmaking, but is above all a surfeit of beautiful images, a scholarly monument to an artist as great as America has produced.Until June 6 (19 E. 82nd St., between Fifth and Madison avenues, 212-439-6870).

Mary Cassatt, on the Outside Looking in

Mary Cassatt, on the Outside Looking in

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