Linear Thinking: Mary Cassatt’s prints with Dr. Nancy Mowll Mathews, Eugénie Prendergast Senior Curator of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Art Emerita, Williams College Museum of Art

• Art/Photo

Of all of Cassatt’s works, this series of original prints exploits the power of line in every sense of the word and evokes the artist’s unique connection of hand, eye, and mind. Cassatt in her early days had what was called “talent of the brush,” and had to struggle to master the art of drawing. It was only in the late 1880s, after decades of refining her approach to line that she developed the pure technique of drypoint and created the set first exhibited in Paris in 1890. The early states of these prints, many of which are in other New York collections, serve as cinematic frames in an animation of Cassatt’s creative process, providing rare insight into her own thoughts, just as throughout the series, she used gestures and gazes (“lines of sight”) to suggest the thoughts of her models. As finished products, the twelve prints document the moment when she emerged as a major artist in Paris, leading to her first one person exhibition in 1891 and showing her analysis of the modern woman, upon which she based her Modern Woman mural of 1892-3.