Q&A with Ruth E. Iskin, author of "Mary Cassatt between Paris and New York"
The new book Mary Cassatt between Paris and New York re-envisions Mary Cassatt in the context of her transatlantic network, friendships, exhibitions, politics, and legacy.
Author Ruth E. Iskin is Professor Emerita at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and is author of Modern Women and Parisian Consumer Culture in Impressionist Painting and The Poster: Art, Advertising, Design, and Collecting, 1860s–1900s, editor of Re-envisioning the Contemporary Art Canon, and coeditor of Collecting Prints, Posters, and Ephemera.
When and why did you develop such an interest in Mary Cassatt, both her work and the person?
I have been interested in Cassatt for years and have written about her in several articles. As a student in the early 1970s, it was an insurmountable challenge to convince my professors to support the idea of a doctoral dissertation on Cassatt, or any woman artist for that matter. I resumed my graduate studies at UCLA in 1990, and my dissertation, which led to my first book, Modern Women and Parisian Consumer Culture in Impressionist Painting, included Cassatt but did not focus on her. While working on my dissertation, I discovered fin-de-siecle posters -- which became the topic of my second book, The Poster: Art, Advertising, Design, and Collecting, 1860s-1900s. For my third book, I finally took up the challenge of writing in depth about Cassatt -- her life, work, politics, and legacy.
Your book Mary Cassatt Between Paris and New York doesn't take the typical approach to tracing a person's life. How did you decide to use this transatlantic framework to chronicle her life?
I found that the traditional approach in art history of linking an artist exclusively to a particular nation-state was not a good fit in the case of Cassatt. Cassatt was often described as an expatriate, but that label did not fit her either. Although she lived in France from age thirty until her death in 1926, she had an enduring strong sense of belonging to the United States. When I read her letters, I was surprised and intrigued to find out that she consistently referred to the United States as “home,” even after decades of living in France. I realized this sentiment was also echoed in other biographical facts, like that she never gave up her American citizenship and that all her best friends, except Edgar Degas, were Americans. It also fits the fact that she dedicated a lot of energy to advising American art collectors to acquire avant-garde French art with the sole goal that they would eventually bequeath their collections to American museums.
What remains timely about Mary Cassatt's vision and works in the current year?
Cassatt, as I came to know her, is still inspiring today in several ways. First, in that she developed her art with the courage of her convictions without succumbing to the conservative dictates of the artistic establishment of her time. This led her to join the Impressionist group of artists when they were still regarded with contempt by many in the art world, including other young American artists in Paris. Unlike them, Cassat admired the new kind of painting and made it her own. I also found Cassatt to be inspiring because of her independence and ambition, unhampered by the ideology of "femininity." As a young artist, she boldly stated that she wanted to “paint better” than the old masters. She is also inspiring for her determination and capability to develop her artistic career at a time when numerous obstacles made that no small challenge for a woman. She is inspiring for her feminism, a topic on which I developed an entire chapter based on what I learned from her letters to Lousine Havemeyer, who began to work for suffrage at Cassatt's urging and became a leading suffrage activist. Cassatt is also inspiring for the far-sightedness of her dedication to contributing to the cultural development of her homeland, the United States, which founded its first art museums during the 1870s, the decade that Cassatt settled in Paris. She recognized the importance of art collections for American museums and set out to mentor and advise American collectors, whose collections she fully expected would eventually be housed in American museums.
Broadly speaking, how did you research this book? What access were you given to Mary Cassatt's letters, etc.?
Archives were crucial to my study. A good part of Cassatt’s letters was published by Nancy Mowll Mathews, which was very helpful. Yet my access to numerous unpublished letters proved key to my ability to understand Cassatt in new ways. At the Archives of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, I was able to read Cassatt’s letters -- over 200 of them -- most of them unpublished, to her best friend, Louisine Havemeyer. Reading them was like reading Cassatt’s private diary. She was so close to Havemeyer that she wrote to her seemingly without censorship. The letters revealed a lot about how Cassatt lived her life, what she cared about, whom she met, her opinions on her friends, her political beliefs, her deep commitment to women’s equality, and her relationship with her homeland and with France. I was also given access to the extensive curatorial files on Cassatt at the Met and the National Art Gallery in Washington. And I traveled to several smaller, more specialized archives.
What do you hope a 2025 audience will take away from your book and Mary Cassatt's life and work?
My hope is that the book’s readers take away an appreciation for Cassatt as an artist who joined the avant-garde artistic circle of her time and, within it, forged her own unique path. And moreover, as someone who did this despite facing social resistance both as a woman and as a foreigner. I hope readers recognize the complexity of Cassatt’s multiple identities and identifications. And I hope the book also helps them see her anew through the chapter that offers the first sustained exploration of her feminism. Next year is Cassatt’s centennial, and several museums are planning major exhibitions of her work (one retrospective was recently shown at the Museum of Fine Arts in Philadelphia and traveled to San Francisco). Others will be held in 2026 in Paris, Chicago, Boston, New York, London, and probably more locations. It is an exciting time for Cassatt’s art.