This year marks the centenary of the death of the American-born painter Mary Cassatt – alongside Berthe Morisot the most important woman artist of the Impressionist movement. While exhibitions of her work this century have tended to focus on her connection to Impressionism, this survey at the Art Institute of Chicago looks mainly at the years after the final Impressionist exhibition in 1886, a period in which she became restlessly experimental, producing complex prints and paintings that borrowed from the conventions of Degas et al. but played with a more realist aesthetic too, as well as being influenced by Japanese art (6 September–3 January 2027). At the centre of the show is a display related to a mural Cassatt made for the Woman’s Building at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. A large triptych featuring pastoral scenes of women in an orchard titled Modern Woman, the work is sadly now lost, but sketches and other ephemera relating to this groundbreaking commission are on show here.
Find out more from the Art Institute of Chicago’s website
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