LABOR not Leisure

The Philadelphia Museum of Art presents the country's first large-scale Mary Cassatt exhibition in 25 years

- Sarah Gianelli

The last large-scale Mary Cassatt exhibition in the United States was in 1998 when the Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the National Gallery of Art mounted Mary Cassatt: Modern Woman. While Cassatt has not faded into obscurity by any means, her works are now widely dispersed among museums and private collections. And because the bulk of her oeuvre is on paper, much of it in pastel, it is light-sensitive and delicate, and rarely brought out for public display.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art has is offering that rare opportunity with Mary Cassatt at Work, which draws from the museum's extensive holdings, among them some of Cassatt's most celebrated paintings and prints, as well as loans from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Cleveland Museum of Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and various private collections.

On view through September 8, the exhibition brings together 130 paintings, drawings, prints and pastels with the added context of extensive personal correspondence, illuminating Cassatt's six-decade-long career investigating the intersection of gender, labor and agency, which until now has not been deeply explored.

"Recent studies by Hollis Clayson, Nicole Georgopulos, Anne Higonnet, Ruth Iskin, Lini Radhakrishnan, Hadrien Viraben, and others have revealed that Cassatt was more calculating and intentional in her imagery than mainstream art history has given her credit," says co-curator Jennifer Thompson, the Gloria and Jack Drosdick Curator of European Painting and Sculpture and Curator of the John G. Johnson Collection, at the Philadelphia Art Museum. "Our project invites close-looking through the study of Cassatt's materials and techniques and consideration of the ways in which she depicts women as active subjects engaged with the world."