Mary Cassatt

Mary Cassatt: Prints and Drawings from the Collection of Ambroise Vollard

EXTRAORDINARY ASSEMBLAGE OF NEVER-BEFORE-SEEN WORKS ON PAPER BY MARY CASSATT REVEALED IN CASSATT FROM THE COLLECTION OF VOLLARD: PRINTS AND DRAWINGS TO BE SHOWN AT ADELSON GALLERIES IN NEW YORK CITY IN SPRING 2008

New York, NY (Autumn, 2007)— Mary Cassatt (1844-1926), the American Impressionist, was captivated by the challenges and artistic possibilities of making prints. These works were a central part of her discipline as a draughtsman, allowing her to focus on the essentials of form, gesture and expression. Ambroise Vollard, the daring new dealer in Paris at the time, was stunned by the vitality and modern vision of her works on paper, and was particularly struck by the sequences of states of her prints, which provided an extraordinary visual record of the creative process. Later in her career, Vollard acquired Cassatt's entire collection of her own prints and drawings, most of which had never been exhibited. These works remained in his holdings until his death in 1939, and were then acquired by the distinguished French dealer and collector, Henri M. Petiet. In 2000, part of this trove of works was finally brought to light by Marc Rosen Fine Art, Ltd. in the ground-breaking exhibition at Adelson Galleries, Mary Cassatt: Prints and Drawings from the Artist's Studio. Another aspect of her artistic experimentation was revealed in the 2004 show held there, Art in a Mirror: The Counterproofs of Mary Cassatt, which presented previously unknown pastel transfers. Now, the full depth of this astonishing cache of Cassatt's graphic works will be put in perspective in what will be the final exhibition of this series, Cassatt from the Collection of Vollard: Prints and Drawings, which will open to the public on April 25, 2008, and remain on view at Adelson Galleries through June 6. Featured will be nearly 100 works, including etchings and aquatints as well as a group of important early drawings, which reveal the range of the artist's creative process and add to the understanding of her innovative approach to art.

"Cassatt from the Collection of Vollard represents the third act in the trilogy that we began in 2000," says Warren Adelson, president of Adelson Galleries. "Once more, the contents of this exhibition are more than beautiful; they are surprising in the range and use of media that so fascinated this unique American woman. For me, the most compelling works of art are the taut and finely delineated pencil drawings and their accompanying etchings, which place the viewer over the shoulder of the artist and allow us to see her at work."

For these three major Cassatt exhibitions, Marc Rosen sought the collaboration of Warren Adelson, who has been supporting new research on Cassatt since 1997 (when Adelson Galleries acquired the Mary Cassatt catalogue raisonné project, updating and expanding Adelyn Dohme Breeskin's seminal 1970 volume).

Mary Cassatt was born in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania. After studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts beginning in 1860, she embarked for Europe in late 1865. She continued her studies in Parma, Rome, Seville and Antwerp prior to settling in Paris in 1874. Her work was accepted at the prestigious Paris Salon for the first time in 1868, when she was 24, and her artistic energies were directed toward achieving recognition at this annual exhibition for nearly a decade. After growing dissatisfied with the conservative academic art world and becoming aware of an exciting and spontaneous new aesthetic fostered by the Impressionists, Cassatt joined this radical group that had rejected the Salon system. From her debut at their fourth independent exhibition in 1878, she was recognized as a leading talent of the group, which included her close friend and mentor Edgar Degas as well as Claude Monet, Édouard Manet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro and Berthe Morisot. Mary Cassatt continued to show with the Impressionists through their final exhibition in 1886. By then she had become increasingly involved in printmaking. In 1891, she finished her landmark "set of ten"—the series of color aquatints inspired by Japanese woodblock prints, which are considered to be among the greatest achievements of nineteenth-century graphic art. She continued to experiment in printmaking throughout the decade. After the turn of the century, Cassatt's critical audience and patronage base shifted increasingly to her native country. When Cassatt became disenchanted with her original dealer, Galeries Durand-Ruel, early in the 20th century, she finally began to sell to Vollard, whom she knew shared her passion for prints and also appreciated her more modern, unfinished pictures, which were less to the taste of Durand-Ruel. In 1915, she was instrumental in organizing a New York exhibition of her own works alongside those of Degas and various Old Masters to help fund the campaign to win the vote for women. Some of her last works were created for this show, but deteriorating eyesight soon brought an end to her active career. In 1926, she died at her chateau in Mesnil-Théribus, France.

For Vollard (1866-1939), being a connoisseur and a dealer were inextricably linked; everything he acquired or published was intended for eventual sale. In this context, it is curious that though he sold many of the paintings and pastels he purchased from Cassatt, the body of prints and related drawings he acquired from her studio appears to have been held aside. Perhaps his own avowed pleasure in them simply exceeded any profit he could have realized. Cassatt's entire "studio collection," including all of the prints and drawings in the present exhibition, were purchased from Vollard's estate after his death in 1939 by Petiet. According to Marc Rosen, Petiet was a man who had begun dealing as a means to justify to his family an already well-established collecting habit. As Rosen came to know him better, Petiet explained that he had placed works by Cassatt with some of the best museums in the United States—by which he meant those where he respected and liked the curators, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.—because of a sense that this great artist was, at the time, still under-appreciated in her native land. However, for decades he kept the lion's share of works for himself and out of public view.

Near the end of his life, Petiet sought out Marc Rosen to bring parts of the collection—that had never been seen by the public—to the market. "In the year before his death in 1980, Petiet asked me to help him 'do something for Mary Cassatt's market,'" said Rosen. "I am happy to be able to document this most extraordinary of all Cassatt collections and to bring it to the market in this exhibition." Cassatt from the Collection of Vollard: Prints and Drawings will also complement the recent exhibition, Cézanne to Picasso—Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago and the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, because it illuminates Vollard's relationship with the one major artist whose work was not featured in that show.

Featured in Cassatt from the Collection of Vollard: Prints and Drawings will be works dealing with some of the artist's most central themes, concerning the place of women in society and unsentimental representations of women with children. The works will range in price from just under $10,000 to $1,000,000.

Accompanying Cassatt from the Collection of Vollard: Prints and Drawings will be a fully illustrated catalogue with a foreword by Warren Adelson; an introduction by Marc Rosen; and essays by Nancy Mowll Mathews, the Eugénie Prendergast Senior Curator of 19th- and 20th- Century Art at the Williams College Museum of Art, co-author of two catalogues raisonnés (including Mary Cassatt: The Color Prints (1989)) and author of numerous books, including five others on Cassatt; and Sarah Bertalan, an independent conservator of works on paper and an editor/compiler of the Paper Conservation Catalogue (a publication of the American Institute for the Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works that codified current standards of practice), as well as other publications.

Just as Cassatt had supported women's causes when her 1915 New York exhibition benefited the suffragette movement, so, too, will Adelson Galleries when it hosts on April 24, 2008, a gala benefit evening at the gallery for the National Breast Cancer Coalition (NBCC) Fund, which brings together under one umbrella hundreds of organizations and tens of thousands of individuals for education, research and training aimed at one unified mission: the eradication of the disease. Supporter tickets will be $125 per person, Patron tickets will be $150 per person and Benefactor tickets will be $250 per person. For more information about this special evening, please call 212.439.6800.

Adelson Galleries is open to the public Monday through Friday, 9:30-5:30, and will be open on Saturdays during this exhibition from 10-5. The galleries are located 19 East 82nd Street, New York, NY. Tel: 212.439-6800. Fax 212.439.6870. Website: www.adelsongalleries.com.