The first comprehensive study of Cassatt’s life, work, and legacy through the prism of a transatlantic framework.

This book re-envisions Mary Cassatt in the context of her transatlantic network, friendships, exhibitions, politics, and legacy. Rather than defining her as either an American artist or a French impressionist, author Ruth E. Iskin argues that we can best understand Cassatt through the complexity of her multiple identifications as an American patriot, a committed French impressionist, and a suffragist.

Contextualizing Cassatt’s feminist outlook within the intense pro- and anti-suffrage debates in the United States, Iskin shows how these impacted her artistic representations of motherhood, fatherhood, and older women. Mary Cassatt between Paris and New York also argues for the historical importance of her work as an advisor to American collectors, and demonstrates the role of museums in shaping her legacy, highlighting the combined impact of gender, national, and transnational dynamics.

About the Author

Ruth E. Iskin 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. She is Professor Emerita at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Her work has been translated into eight languages.

Reviews

"Rarely have I so much enjoyed reading art historical scholarship. Iskin's biography of Mary Cassatt is so engaging and offers new insights informed by various methodological concerns including feminism, network theory, and transatlantic studies."—Cécile Whiting, Chancellor’s Professor Emerita of Art History, University of California, Irvine

“Here is an in-depth, highly detailed account of certain of Mary Cassatt’s lifelong transatlantic connections—social, professional, and political—and the important role they played in the legacy she left behind.”—Michelle Foa, author of Georges Seurat: The Art of Vision

"Iskin’s book brings Mary Cassatt to life as never before for contemporary readers. It reframes her legacy and reinterprets her art in the context of the feminist politics of her era, shining a revelatory spotlight on Cassatt’s devotion to the cause of women’s suffrage and to the collaborative feminist friendships that sustained her."—Norma Broude, Professor Emerita of Art History at American University, Washington, DC

"Ruth E. Iskin provides a provocative new account of Cassatt's transatlantic career as an artist, art collector, art advisor, suffragist, and champion of the avant-garde. This book deepens and complicates our understanding of the Impressionist’s multifaceted impact on modernity."—David M. Lubin, author of Grand Illusions: American Art and the First World War

"Through meticulous research embedded in an engaging narrative, Ruth E. Iskin offers a complete story of Mary Cassatt’s cosmopolitan life and work. The book offers new perspectives on the artist’s legacy by highlighting her cultivation of robust transatlantic networks that supported her feminist ideals as an artist and advisor to prominent American collectors of her era."—Paula J. Birnbaum, author of Sculpting a Life: Chana Orloff between Paris and Tel Aviv

"With pathbreaking new insights, Iskin’s ambitious book lays out Cassatt’s radically advanced views on women’s issues and the pursuit of making great art. Engagingly written and profusely illustrated, one finds no analysis of brush strokes here, but much insight into the artist’s subjects and settings, including Cassatt’s novel approach to painting mothers and children without recourse to the customary sentimentality."—Karen Offen, author of Debating the Woman Question in the French Third Republic, 1870–1920