The Degas Cassatt is at the end of the hall that is right of the rotunda on the mainfloor of the West Building.
1. Walk into the Front Door of the West Building.
2. You will see the rotunda fountain Immediately after you enter the front doors.
3. Walk a few steps and turn right — to walk down the sculpture-lined hall.
The Degas/Cassatt Exhibit is off the left side of the atrium, that is located at the end of the right hall on the main floor of the West building.
Pastel boxes originally owned by Mary Cassatt and recently acquired by the Art Materials Collection and Study Center at the National Gallery of Art.
Washington, DC—The National Gallery of Art has recently acquired three original pastel boxes that were owned by Mary Cassatt. They will go on public view for a limited time only in conjunction with Degas/Cassatt, the immensely popular exhibition that has drawn more than 300,000 visitors to date.
Both the exhibition and display of pastels will end on October 5, an occasion marked with the public symposium Degas and Cassatt: Different Perspectives from 11:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. in the West Building Lecture Hall.
Mary Cassatt most likely began working in pastel around 1878. She exhibited three pastels in her debut at the 1879 impressionist exhibition, including At the Theater (1878/1879), which is currently on display in the exhibition. Her interest in the medium reflects her enthusiasm for exploring alternative to oil paints and by the 1890s, pastel eclipsed oil as her preferred medium.
Presumably in 1920, Cassatt gave these boxes of pastels to ten-year-old Electra Webb Bostwick, the granddaughter of Louisine Havemeyer, an art collector and dear friend of the artist. Years later, Bostwick recalled, “Not realizing the value of the pastels I wasted lots of them on playing and swapping them with my friends.”
Donated to the Shelburne Craft School in Vermont in the early 1940s, these boxes were brought to the attention of the Gallery by conservators at the Shelburne Musmeum. As a result, the pastel boxes have recently been acquired by the Gallery’s Art Materials Collection and Study Center, a permanent home for artists’ materials, technical information, and trade literature. Having Mary Cassatt’s actual art supplies will enable Gallery conservators and art historians to further their analysis and understanding of the artist’s process, and of the materials themselves.
http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/press/2014/cassatt-pastel-boxes.html
In her last decades, Cassatt was using pastels more than oil paints. Her luminous colors were vibrant — beautiful fuchsias and teals. In 1920 — six years before she died — Cassatt gave these boxes of chalk pastels to the 10-year-old granddaughter of her New York friend and patron Louisine Havemeyer. Years later, that granddaughter, Electra Webb Bostwick , admitted she didn’t know just how special the gift was.
“Not realizing the value of the pastels I wasted lots of them on playing and swapping them with my friends,” she recalled.
Now they belong to the National Gallery’s collection of artists’ materials — paints, brushes and other artifacts, useful to scholars and other artists who study them for inspiration and edification. They’ll be on view until Oct. 5.
Mary Cassatt’s 1878 painting Little Girl in a Blue Armchair, a fidgeting young child slouches into the pillowy embrace of a turquoise chair. The girl’s scruffy black and brown dog sleeps on the seat next to her, adding to the tranquility of this domestic scene.
The canvas is a quintessential Cassatt. However, recent cleaning of the work and infrared images taken by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., reveal that brushstrokes from someone else’s hand are also present—Cassatt’s friend and colleague Edgar Degas. The French artist subtly changed the shape of the room. He had the floor intersect with the back wall at an angle, rather than perpendicularly, creating negative spaces that are strange and unexpected.
Upon discovering these details of Degas’s intervention on Cassatt’s canvas, a team of experts at the National Gallery decided to explore further. They organized the exhibitionDegas/Cassatt to investigate the previously unknown depth of the pair’s artistic relationship. The show, which opens May 11, will feature a selection of 70 paintings, drawings, and works of mixed media by both artists to highlight their artistic dialogue.
Degas first met Cassatt (who was born in Pittsburgh but spent much of her life in Paris) on an 1877 visit to her Montmartre studio. “He recognized right off the bat that they had a shared sensibility,” says the show’s curator, Kim Jones, and he invited her to participate in the Impressionist exhibition he was organizing with his fellow “independent” painters. Their introduction marked the beginning of a friendship that lasted nearly 40 years. A lack of existing correspondence between the two makes it difficult to discern the specific details of their interactions, but their artworks—particularly those created between the late-1870s and the mid-1880s, the period of the Impressionist exhibitions in Paris—leave behind compelling clues about their friendship.
Between 1879–89, both Degas and Cassatt took major risks with their art, experimenting with unconventional media such as tempera, distemper, and metallic paints. In Degas’sPortrait after a Costume Ball (Portrait of Mme. Dietz-Monnin), for instance, the artist juxtaposed patches of smooth, matte pigment with wide strokes of metallic paint and delicate applications of pastel to create a textural and frenetic surface. Cassatt tested these materials as well in works like Woman Standing, Holding a Fan and Lydia Seated on a Porch, Crocheting. She also used metallics to add a subtle sheen to oil paint. In The Loge, she incorporated small bits of shimmering, simulated gold paint throughout the canvas to vitalize the scene.
Jones selected many other works that demonstrate Degas and Cassatt’s ongoing artistic exchange. For example, one compositional element commonly employed by both artists was the s-curve, in which the movement of a model’s arms complemented the contraposto or angular pose of their torso to create an elegant, lithe s-shape. The s-curve can be seen in Degas’s pastel and charcoal work Woman Bathing in a Shallow Tub (ca. 1885) and his 1894 drawing Morning Toilet, among others. In conversation with Degas, Cassatt executed s-curves in her ca. 1889 drypoint print Young Girl Fixing her Hair and in the oil painting Child Picking a Fruit (1893).
Degas often enlisted his friends to model for his paintings, but none more frequently than Cassatt. She is the subject of at least eight of Degas’s works, and scholars believe her likeness appears in many more. In most of his depictions of the American artist, she plays a specific role. The unfinished painting Mary Cassatt, however, is the only true portrait that he painted of her. She owned the piece and displayed it in her studio. (Degas also owned numerous works by Cassatt.)
The location depicted in the portrait is vague, but the table in the background and small pictures Cassatt holds suggest that she might be in a photography studio. Artists and dealers commonly had cartes de visite taken to document works in their possession. By depicting Cassatt as the subject of a portrait, likely holding objects associated with her craft, Degas establishes her as his peer and as a successful artist in her own right.
It is a common misconception that Cassatt was merely a pupil of Degas, when in fact both artists learned from and respected one another, and executed daring experiments using unconventional materials.
Says Jones, “she’s a much edgier artist than people give her credit for.”
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In her novel I Always Loved You, author Robin Oliveira imagines a passionate scene between Edgar Degas — a French artist known for his paintings of dancers — and Mary Cassatt — an American painter known for her scenes of family life. The kiss in the novel is pure fiction, but then again, “nobody knows what goes on in their neighbor’s house, let alone what happened between two artists 130 years ago,” Oliveira says.
It’s possible that Cassatt’s use of unconventional materials inspired Degas’ textured surface on Portrait after a Costume Ball (1879). The Art Institute of Chicago
[An exhibit] … in Washington, D.C., explores the tumultuous, passionate, artistic relationship between the two artists.
“In many ways, [it] is a romance of two like minds who admired one another greatly, and who I believe completely relied on one another for artistic and emotional help,” Oliveira says. “Their relationship is a sort of an elevated, intellectual love affair that tied them to one another for the rest of their lives after they met.”
They left behind no diaries, no letters. National Gallery curator Kimberly A. Jones says it was a passionate but platonic aesthetic attraction. “There’s no indication that there was anything romantic between the two of them,” Jones says.
So what was the relationship between this American in Paris, and a Frenchman, 10 years her senior, who was known and respected in artistic circles?
“It was all about the art, and that kind of laser focus and 100 percent dedication to the art that they really shared,” Jones says.
They met in 1877. At 33, Cassatt was studying painting in Paris. At 43, Degas’ work was on view around town. “Even before she actually met him she recounts how she had seen one of his pastels in a storefront window and she pressed her nose up against it and was just dazzled by what he was able to do,” Jones says. “She knew his art and was thinking this is the direction I should be going in. So he really did change her path.”
Oliveira — who did a tremendous amount of research for her novel — says before the Degas dazzle, Cassatt had been trying to master a more traditional approach.
In At the Theater, Cassatt incorporates metallic paint with gouache and pastel.
Collection of Ann and Gordon Getty
“He helped her switch from the academic style of painting that she had been trying to learn — which was sort of the standard across Paris — and encouraged her along into the impressionist style, the impressionist brush stroke, the use of color and light. The subject matter changed.”
Neither Degas nor Cassatt liked the term “impressionism”; to them it implied carelessness, haste. They called themselves “independents” and labored over their work. A year after meeting Degas, Cassatt made a painting that was a real break in her style.
Little Girl in a Blue Armchair is full of Degas’ influence. First of all, he brought the girl to Cassatt — she was the child of his friends. In a pretty dress, she sits slumped in a chair, hand behind her head and legs spread apart. She looks bored, exhausted and not at all dainty or proper. Other big blue chairs and a sofa are in the room — “like bumper cars,” Jones says. A window in the corner may show Degas’ direct influence.
In a letter written long after she made the work, Cassatt told her dealer that Degas came into her studio and worked on the painting with her. Looking for evidence, National Gallery conservator Ann Hoenigswald used X-rays, infrared imaging and magnification to study a diagonal — unusual in a Cassatt background — that builds across the canvas from that rear corner window.
“We looked at it, and indeed the strokes were a little bit different. They were these sharp, small, quick strokes that we weren’t seeing anywhere else,” Hoenigswald says.
Degas frequently painted and sketched Cassatt. Above, he captures her at the Louvre, in 1879-1880.
The Art Institute of Chicago
The brushwork of Degas, perhaps. Cassatt’s influence on Degas can be seen in a painting with an unusual mixture of media — pastels, oils and metallic paint. Cassatt was the first to use metallic paint on canvas; ordinarily it was for decorating crafts. Jones believes Degas saw Cassatt’s metallics and decided to try it himself.
They worked side by side at times, went to exhibitions together, and Degas often drew and painted Cassatt. A frequent image: Cassatt at the Louvre, painted from the rear — big hat, smart jacket, long skirt, tiny waist, her right hand and arm leaning on an umbrella as if it were a walking stick.
“You have this wonderful juxtaposition of the female curves of her body,” Jones says. “The way he has her leaning plays off the swell of her hips and her waist. But you have that powerful arm — and it’s this perfect balance of elegance and strength.”
Confident and in control, Cassatt owns the space. Degas captured that image of Cassatt in pencil, pastel, prints and paint. Jones says Degas also captured Cassatt in the art he bought.
“He owned more works by Cassatt than [by] any other contemporary artist,” she says. “More than Pissarro, Manet, Gauguin.”
They remained friends all their lives, although they went their separate artistic ways in later years. Their interests and styles changed. Degas’ eyesight failed, as did Cassatt’s. But the intensity of their relationship — the early obsessions — shaped each of them, early on.
“Edgar Degas’s ‘Rehearsal in the Studio, from about 1878-1879, is one of the works in ‘Degas/Cassatt’, a … show at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.”
“The Cassatt masterpiece ‘Little Girl in a Blue Armchair’ (1878), from the National Gallery’s collection, appears at the beginning of the show.”
“Degas’s portrait of Cassatt, from around 1879-1894”
“With just 70 works squeezed into four small galleries, this show is not your typical Impressionist blockbuster. And it’s so focused on technique, so determined to avoid any hint of romance or paternalism, that it sometimes feels clinical.”
WASHINGTON — “The friendship between Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas is one of the few remaining mysteries of Impressionism. She was a wealthy, independent American suffragist who painted upper-class women tending children and taking in the opera; he was a Frenchman, a decade older, who spied on nudes in brothels and once said that women couldn’t understand style.
“Curators, mindful of the age difference and of Cassatt’s status as an expatriate living and working on Degas’s turf, have tended to show us a student-teacher relationship. So it’s refreshing to see, instead, a platonic power couple, as we do in “Degas/Cassatt” at the National Gallery.
“With just 70 works squeezed into four small galleries, this show is not your typical Impressionist blockbuster. And it’s so focused on technique, so determined to avoid any hint of romance or paternalism, that it sometimes feels clinical.
“Familiar paintings and pastels are outnumbered here by prints and drawings. But that focus ultimately proves to be a smart decision, as in MoMA’s show “Gauguin: Metamorphoses.” The unpolished, process-oriented works by Degas and Cassatt present both artists in a new light, allowing viewers a glimpse of the inspiration each found in the work of the other.
“One exception to the limited role of major paintings: the Cassatt masterpiece “Little Girl in a Blue Armchair,” from the National Gallery’s collection, which appears right at the beginning of the show. Fresh from a trip to the conservation lab, it dazzles with its predominant hue of deep turquoise.
“A letter from Cassatt to her dealer Ambroise Vollard, also on view, proclaims that Degas worked on an area of the painting’s background; the recent cleaning and infrared photography have revealed that changes were indeed made. A horizontal line became a much more Degas-esque diagonal, and a small dog was moved from the floor to a soft chair in the foreground (where it has more of a rapport with the painting’s slouching subject.)
“In smaller works shown nearby, Degas and Cassatt conduct separate but parallel material experiments with metallic paint, distemper and egg tempera. In her pastel “At the Theater,” for instance, Cassatt gives a subtle glint to the fan held by an operagoer; Degas, meanwhile, made his “Dancers (Fan Design)” shimmer with a liberal application of powdered silver.
“More intense collaborations emerge in the next gallery, which is devoted entirely to prints. Most of them relate to an unrealized journal of 1879-80, Le Jour et la Nuit, which was to involve other Impressionists like Camille Pissarro and Gustave Caillebotte.
“At the time, Cassatt was new to printmaking — she did not produce her most famous prints, the Japanese-influenced series of mothers and children, until the 1890s — but she threw herself into the project, with some help from Degas (who introduced her to the technique of soft-ground etching).
“In that sense, he served as Cassatt’s mentor, an idea reinforced by a few of her tentative studies of standing nudes, seen from the back, which clearly echo voyeuristic works by Degas. But, on the whole, the prints convey a sense of shared enterprise. Both artists, for instance, allude to the journal’s title with bold silhouettes and other plays of light and dark — Degas in a marvelous scene of actresses in their dressing rooms, and Cassatt in a view of two women at the opera that relates to her well-known painting “The Loge” (also here).
“The show organizer and the museum’s associate curator of French paintings, Kimberly A. Jones, argues that Degas and Cassatt, seen in black and white, look more like equals. This view gives Cassatt a little edge, and lends gentility to Degas’s often dishabille actresses and women of the night.
But it can’t totally erase the distinctions between their social milieus. The fact remains that Degas could go places Cassatt couldn’t, even at the opera, where a woman without male accompaniment was restricted to the loge and limited to matinee performances. She could not roam the orchestra, or lurk backstage, or haunt the nighttime cafe-concerts, as Degas did to gather material for Jour et Nuit. Her subjects are inevitably boxed-in; only their eyes may wander, with the aid of opera glasses.
One place she could visit, with relative freedom, was the museum. In a pastel by Degas, “At the Louvre (Miss Cassatt),” she is clearly in her element, leaning jauntily on her umbrella as her companion (probably her sister) perches primly on a bench. Related prints and sketches make it clear that Degas appreciated Cassatt’s swagger; in some versions, he places her right at the center of the image, so that she eclipses the second figure.
He also made a more conventional portrait of Cassatt, albeit one that depicts her as a very unconventional woman; it shows her leaning forward, as if she were about to leap from her chair, displaying an aggression normally reserved for men (like the similarly posed print collector in an earlier Degas painting, seen in the catalog).
Cassatt liked the portrait enough to hang it in her studio. But some three decades later she sold it, writing to her dealer Paul Durand-Ruel in 1912 or 1913, “It has artistic qualities but it is painful and depicts me as such a repugnant person, I don’t want anyone to know that I posed for it.”
“By that point, her friendship with Degas had become strained; they had taken opposite sides of the Dreyfus affair, and their artistic interests had diverged (with Degas moving closer to abstraction in loose pastels and continually reworked canvases, and Cassatt adopting a tight figurative realism influenced by Japanese prints and American painters like Thomas Eakins). Both artists, difficult personalities to begin with, were becoming more cantankerous with age and failing health. The distance is apparent in prints and paintings from the 1890s, in the show’s final gallery. Here the brushy, violent Degas canvas “Scene From the Steeplechase: The Fallen Jockey” is flanked by two precise, saccharine Cassatt paintings of women and children picking apples in Edenic orchards.
“Fortunately, “Degas/Cassatt” does not leave us here. It has an alternate conclusion, of works the artists exchanged over the years, which supports the show’s theme of reciprocity. We can see that Degas owned multiple versions of Cassatt’s print “The Visitor,” of a woman calling on a friend in a well-appointed parlor, and that Cassatt had a large pastel of a Degas nude squatting over a washtub.
“And we can appreciate that their friendship was — like many friendships between artists — professional, competitive and complicated. It was, in other words, a relationship of equals.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/30/arts/design/degas-and-cassatt-paired-at-the-national-gallery.html
Girl Arranging Her Hair – Cassatt
Morning Toilet – Degas
If you ask most of today’s artists if they copy from each other, most will be insulted and exclaim with a resounding, “NO!” Today’s art culture shames the copier; yet, that has not always been the case. It is common knowledge that the Old Masters copied the works of artists before them. It might be surprising, however, to know that even the Impressionists copied. I love what Mary Cassatt had to say about copying:
“Why do these young girls come to me for advice? They have not the slightest notion of giving to art the devotion it requires. I say to the, ‘Do you ever go to the Louvre and copy some of the great masters?’ And they invariably answer, ‘Oh, no, we can’t, we are working in the studio, we have no time.’ ‘Degas does,’ I answer.”
Quote from the Degas/Cassatt Exhibition CatalogueJones, p. 89
Two Studies Mary Cassatt at the Louvre – Degas – 1879 – Charcoal and Pastel – Private Collection
Mary Cassatt at the Louvre – Degas – c. 1879 – Pastel – Philadelphia Museum of Art
At the Louvre (Miss Cassatt) – Degas – 1879 – Pastel – Private Collection
Visit to a Museum – Degas – c. 1879 – 1890 -Oil on Canvas – Museum of Fine Arts Boston
Woman Viewed from Behind (Visit to a Museum) – Degas – c. 1879 – 1885 – Oil on Canvas – NGA
Young Woman Tying Her Hat Ribbons (Mary Cassatt) – c. 1882 – Pastel and Charcoal – Musee d’Orsay
Mary Cassatt – Degas – c. 1879 – 1894 – Oil on Canvas – National Portrait Gallery , Smithsonian
Portraits in a Frieze – Degas – 1879 – Pastel – Private Collection
Girl Arranging Her Hair – Cassatt –
Morning Toilet – Degas – 1894 – Pastel – Private Collection
Dancers – Degas – c. 1897 – Pastel with Charcoal – The Detroit Institute of Arts
The Tub – Degas – 1886 – Pastel – Musee d’Orsay
Woman in a Shallow Tub – Degas
The Child’s Bath – Cassatt – 1893 – Oil on Canvas – Art Institute of Chicago
The Loge – Cassatt c. 1878 – 1880 – Oil on Canvas – National Gallery of Art
At the Theater – Cassatt – 1878 – 1879 – Pastel and Gouache with Metallic Paint – Collection of Ann and Gordon Getty
In the Loge – Cassatt – Boston Museum of Fine Arts
“At the 1879 and 1880 impressionist exhibitions, she exhibited half a dozen works on the topic of female spectators at the opera, while Degas exhibited over a dozen works relating to ballet, cafe entertainment, and performance. Also dealing with spectatorship and this in close onversation with Cassatt’s works are his earlier painting The Ballet from ‘Robert le Diable’ … along with several works…including Dancer with a Bouquet.” Jones, Kimberly. Degas/Cassatt, p. 9.
The Ballet from “Robert le Diable” – Degas – 1871 – Oil on Canvas The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Dancer with a Bouquet – Degas – c. 1877 – 1878 – Pastel and Gourache over Monotype Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design
Rehearsal in the Studio – Degas – 1878 0 1879 – Egg Tempera on Canvas – Collection of Shellburne Museum Vermont
Dancer in the Dressing Room – Degas – c. 1878 – 1879 – Pastel and Gouache – Collection Oskar Reinhart
“Both artists use croppig to tease the viewer.” Jones, p. 11
Your National Gallery of Art 