VASC Lecture: Mary Morton, Marketing Mary Cassatt. Or Not.

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The Visiting Artists and Scholars Committee are excited to announce our second lecture of the semester, Marketing Mary Cassatt. Or Not. with Dr. Mary Morton, the curator and head of the French Paintings department at the National Gallery of Art! Please join us for an engaging talk followed by a Q & A with the speaker.

Marketing Mary Cassatt. Or Not.

Heralded as the ‘inventor’ of Impressionism for his role in supporting and defining the movement, Paul Durand-Ruel was a brilliant dealer whose business strategies essentially changed the way art is marketed and sold.  He was also a monarchist and a fervent Catholic, regularly involved in activism on behalf of the Church.  The ‘Impressionism’ that he formed was circumscribed by his social and political conservatism, and while he pushed the colorful landscapes of Claude Monet, the ballerinas of Edgar Degas and the beautiful women and pretty girls of Auguste Renoir, Mary Cassatt herself, as an unmarried, childless, professional American woman, did not easily find a place in his stable of artists. He was less supportive of her career and, it will be argued, even undermined her at times, but by the 1890s he realized the full value of her access to the American market through her network of wealthy collectors, including both her brother Alec, among the richest men in America, and her friend Louisine Havemeyer, married to the Domino sugar fortune.  Durand-Ruel encouraged Cassatt as an artist towards images of motherhood, appropriate for female artists and popular among collectors, and marketed her specifically as the “painter of the modern Madonna.”  The moniker largely remains in place today, despite Cassatt’s expansive oeuvre addressing a range of contemporary female experience.

Host or Publisher Corcoran Art History Program