Mary Stevenson Cassatt, dite Mary Cassatt, née le 22 mai 1844 à Allegheny City (qui fait actuellement partie de Pittsburgh) en Pennsylvanie et décédée le 14 juin 1926 au Le Mesnil-Théribus (France), où elle est enterrée, est une artiste-peintre américaine.
Amie de Degas, on rattache souvent son œuvre à l'impressionnisme, qui a eu une grande influence sur son œuvre précoce. Ses peintures et ses dessins de maturité doivent cependant plutôt être comparés à ceux qu'a produit la génération de peintres post-impressionnistes : Toulouse-Lautrec ou encore les Nabis, avec qui elle partage un net intérêt pour les peintres de l'Ukiyo-e, période du japonisme.
Quelques peintures
- Le Toréador, 1873, Art Institute of Chicago
- Petite fille dans un fauteuil bleu, 1878, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
- Au théâtre, 1879, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO
- Femme lisant dans un jardin, 1880, Art Institute of Chicago
- Femme Cousant, c.1880-82, Musée d'Orsay
- Femme en noir, c. 1882
- La Lampe, 1891, Art Institute of Chicago
- La Toilette
- Sarah tenant son chien(pastel)
- Le Berceau
Mary Cassatt was the daughter of an affluent Pittsburgh businessman, of French ancestry. In 1861, she studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and was required to draw copies of prints and plaster casts before she was allowed to paint. Between 1865 and 1869 she traveled and studied throughout Europe. In 1868, Cassatt had her first painting accepted by the Paris Salon. Cassatt embraced more radical art in the mid-1870s, when she discovered the works of the Impressionists. She was the only American to exhibit with the Impressionists.
In 1877 Degas saw Cassatt's work at the Salon and invited her to join the impressionists. Having experienced a number of rejections from Salon exhibitions and other significant juried shows, Cassatt readily accepted Degas' invitation, and aligned herself the Impressionists, thereby rejecting the system of juried exhibitions. They both came from similar upper-class backgrounds, and shared common visual
In 1879, Cassatt worked closely with Degas and Pissarro in making prints, for a journal of black-and-white etchings. Although never published her involvement in this project would indelibly influence her oeuvre. She experimented with graphic techniques, which were very important to Cassatt's development as a printmaker. During this period, Cassatt became a highly innovative printmaker, using rich textures, sophisticated shadings, and vigorous lines to capture the luminous spectacle of women at the theater and family posed in lamplit interiors. The majority of these works were soft-ground etchings with aquatint, a process that echoed Cassatt's experience as a painter. Throughout the latter half of the 1880’s, Cassatt used a process called drypoint.
In 1890, there was a large exhibition of Japanese woodblock prints in Paris. Cassatt frequently attended the exhibition, which increased her interest in printmaking. She particularly admired the work of the Kitagawa Utamaro, a Japanese master, who depicted typical moments in a woman's day. The exhibition had a profound effect on Cassatt, and inspired her to create a series of colour aquatints. Ten prints were executed in 1891 and became one of the major achievements of her career and a milestone in the history of printmaking. To create her prints Cassatt used a plate for the tonal area and another for drypoint lines. She applied color by hand to each of the plates, which were then successively impressed upon paper. The procedure was complex and labor-intensive, requiring a day of preparation just to ink and reprint the plates for each of the impressions.
Japanese woodblock prints, heavily influenced Cassatt’s composition, colour, perspective, and subject matter. Women bathing children is a theme commonly found in Japanese art and Cassatt depicts women and children who are neither European nor Asian. Largely because of the exhibition, her draughtsmanship became more emphatic; her colors clearer and more boldly defined. It also confirmed her predilection for printmaking techniques. Cassatt is one of the foremost American printmakers of the nineteenth century. She produced over 220 prints during the course of her career.
Cassatt frequently chose her family and friends as models, whom she depicted in their bourgeois pastimes. Cassatt's sister, Lydia, and their parents lived with the artist in Paris. Her sister often served as a model. Lydia had been diagnosed with an incurable kidney ailment and died in 1882. The loss was devastating to Cassatt, who was left to care for her aging parents alone while directing her busy and demanding career. Her sitters possess startling characterization in their appearance and actions. Because they neither pose for nor acknowledge the viewer, they convey something authentic and immediate. Mothers with children are perhaps the subjects most often linked with Cassatt, and she rendered the theme throughout her career. Degas' advice was, "It is essential to do the same subject over and over again, ten times, a hundred times." Naturalism and sensuousness characterize her portrayals of children.
Cassatt’s pictures of mother and child were presented as an icon of universal ideas, which share certain formal characteristics. All are half-length compositions with little background detail. The space is closed and compressed in a quiet, controlled mood. These features suggest that Cassatt's depictions may have been attempts to create "modern Madonna’s," contemporary renditions on the timeless theme of new life and maternal love. She updated the traditional Madonna-and child formula through gesture and psychological subtlety. Despite the apparent spontaneity of these mother and-child images, Cassatt planned the compositions meticulously and was careful in selecting her models, who, were not always mother and child. Cassatt's contemporaries recognized both the religious allusions of her mother and child pictures and her departure from their traditional expression. In rendering this subject, the artist relied on keen observation rather than idealization, but still portrayed great intimacy. Cassatt not only painted in a modern way; she reflected the most advanced 19th-century ideas about raising children.
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