Mary Cassatt: After Impressionism at the Art Institute of Chicago

A hundred years after her death, Mary Cassatt is back in the city that gave her the biggest commission of her life. Mary Cassatt: After Impressionism opened at the Art Institute of Chicago on September 6 and runs through January 3, 2027. It is the museum's first in-depth look at her in more than twenty-five years, and it makes an unusual choice: it is less interested in the Impressionist she was than in the artist she became next.

Why "after" Impressionism?

Most of us meet Cassatt as the American in Paris whom Degas invited to show with the Impressionists in 1877. (If you need that story, start with who Mary Cassatt was.) This exhibition picks her up a decade later, in the late 1880s, when the group's exhibitions had ended and she was free to go her own way. It follows her into the early 1900s through some 70 paintings, pastels, and prints.

The curator, Annelise K. Madsen, told WBEZ that she came to see Cassatt as a "relentless experimenter," and the show is built to prove it. Color, material, pattern, printmaking, a sixty-foot mural: in these years Cassatt tried almost everything, and almost none of it looks like the soft-focus Impressionism the word "Cassatt" usually calls to mind.

The painting at the center of everything

The galleries open with early work, some of it showing her debt to the Renaissance, then move through scenes of women reading, at the opera, and caring for children. A hallway leads to The Child's Bath of 1893, which the Art Institute bought in 1910 and which Madsen calls "the bridge" to the rest of the exhibition.

It earns the role. Look at how little of it is about sentiment and how much is about design: the bold stripes of the mother's dress, the flattened floor tilting up toward us, the view from above, the two heads bent toward the same small foot. From this room the exhibition branches. One way leads to her prints and the Japanese art that changed them; the other follows her mothers and children; a third room holds a painting that no longer exists.

Ten prints that changed everything

In the spring of 1890 a vast exhibition of Japanese woodblock prints opened at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Cassatt went, and according to Madsen she was "really energized" by what she saw. Within a year she had made a set of ten color prints unlike anything in Western printmaking: flat planes of color, patterned fabrics, bold outlines, ordinary women going about a private day. She showed them in 1891 in her first solo exhibition, in Paris.

She did not make woodcuts. She translated the look of them into drypoint and aquatint, inking the plates by hand, color by color, working alongside a printer to pull each impression. (For the tradition she was answering, read what ukiyo-e is.)

The ten include a woman sealing a letter, a fitting at the dressmaker's, two friends at tea, a woman lighting a lamp, a mother kissing her baby, and a woman arranging her hair at the mirror. Each one sets a quiet everyday act against an explosion of pattern.

The impressions above belong to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, which holds several states of each print. You can follow the whole set, and the rest of her graphic work, on Cassatt's artist page.

Mothers and children, without the sugar

Cassatt never had children of her own. Madsen told WBEZ that she nonetheless brought "seriousness" and "a sense of purpose" to the subject, and it shows. Her mothers are busy and her babies are heavy. Hands do real work.

The lost mural of 1893

This is the room that makes the show a Chicago story. In 1892 Bertha Honoré Palmer, president of the Board of Lady Managers for the World's Columbian Exposition, commissioned Cassatt to paint a mural for the fair's Woman's Building. The result, Modern Woman, was about sixty feet wide and fourteen feet high, a triptych set high on the wall of the building's hall of honor. Opposite it hung Mary Fairchild MacMonnies's Primitive Woman.

Cassatt's three panels showed young girls chasing a figure of Fame, women and girls in an orchard gathering what she called the "fruits of knowledge or science," and three women making music and dancing. She had about nine months to paint it. In a letter she wrote that she "certainly did not spend the summer in singing and dancing, but in the hardest of work." According to Madsen, she also pressed for, and won, the same fee as the men painting murals at the fair.

Then it vanished. The Woman's Building came down after the fair, the mural was last recorded in a Chicago storage facility in 1912, and it is presumed destroyed. The exhibition fills its place with a video about the commission, Cassatt's letters to Palmer and to MacMonnies, and a copy of William Walton's book on the fair's art, which holds the only known color reproduction of any part of it. Around that case hang easel paintings and prints from the same months, among them The Banjo Lesson and her prints of women gathering fruit.

These smaller works are the ghost of Modern Woman: the same orchard light, the same women in pale dresses, the same music. Stand in that room and you can almost assemble the missing wall in your head.

Planning your visit

• Dates: through January 3, 2027.
• Tickets: members and their guests get in free; everyone else needs a $7 exhibition ticket in addition to museum admission. The museum strongly recommends booking ahead, since timed tickets can sell out on weekends and holidays.
• While you're there: the Art Institute's permanent collection is one of the great Impressionist collections in the world, anchored in part by the paintings Bertha and Potter Palmer collected themselves. Our guide to what you can't miss at the Art Institute will help you plan the rest of the day.

Can't get to Chicago? Paris has the other half

The centenary is being marked on both sides of the Atlantic. On October 6 the Musée d'Orsay opened its own retrospective, Mary Cassatt. L'indépendante, with some 80 works, running through January 31, 2027. Where Chicago follows the experimenter, Paris celebrates the independent woman who made France her home for six decades.

See more Cassatt on DiscoverArt

Cassatt spent her life arguing that the private, ordinary hours of women's lives deserved the most serious art. A century on, two great museums agree. Explore every Cassatt we hold on her artist page, from the early theater boxes to the late pastels, and heart the ones that stop you. DiscoverArt will learn your eye and show you what else you might love, whether that is the women artists history overlooked, her friend Edgar Degas, or the Japanese prints that lit the spark.