Cassatt

The lingering image of American impressionist painter Mary Cassatt as a genteel lady of leisure, a celebrator of upper-class refinement and comfort whose style was largely derivative of Degas is demolished in this stunning retrospective combining letters, reminiscences, critical essays, articles and memoirs by her contemporaries with 118 full-page color plates plus 102 black-and-white photographs. Born in 1844 to a prominent Pittsburgh family, dynamic, charismatic Cassatt, who settled in Paris in 1874, was a hardworking, lonely idealist who lived in her art, an outspoken feminist and an uncompromising fighter for artistic freedom and experimentation. Her popular images of mothers and children radiate maternal tenderness but also bristle with humor and penetrating irony. Cassatt, who died nearly blind at the age of 82, invented an emotional lyricism revealed through faces, gestures and movements. Mathews, a curator at the Williams College Museum of Art and biographer of Cassatt, has assembled a vivid, composite portrait of the artist and her circle. (Nov.)