Mary Cassatt's hidden art finds light
Cassatt coup: Works by the original American Impressionist unveiled in Houston
"Baby Charles Looking Over His Mother's Shoulder (No. 2)", 1900
"Feeding the Ducks", 1895
"Gathering Fruit", 1893
The saga of painter Mary Cassatt's secretly held works is unfolding at Houston's Meredith Long & Company. The exhibition, Mary Cassatt: Works on Paper, unveiled this week, and represents the premier sale of 41 significant prints and drawings that until very recently have remained hidden in the seemingly long-lost collection of Cassatt's friend and dealer, Abroise Vollard.
"I remember when I started in the art business, I thought I would be like Vollard," Houston's own authoritative dealer Meredith Long says. "He provided the exposure to solidify the Impressionist movement. He was a very adventurous dealer, and he bought things, which we do as well."
Cassatt won a place in the art historical canon as the only American transplant and woman to display with the Impressionists in their epochal public shows. However, the sampling at Meredith Long & Co. is a tightly-held caché Vollard bought directly out of Cassatt's studio. The prints and drawings on display completely bypassed the eyes of fin de siècle Parisians, and after over a century of having remained wrapped in paper, are making their debut to Houston audiences.
"These works quite literally have never seen the light of day," Long, explains "and are undiminished by the effects of time."
Long attributes the Cassatt coup to the result of 50 years of work with a New York dealer, who wishes to remain anonymous.
Despite their obscure provenance, the show's works are "top of the line," according to Long.
"She was so much more than just a woman from Pittsburgh who went to Paris to study art," Long says. "She was a colleague of the Impressionists, an associate with Degas, and inarguabaly the movement's master printmaker."
When it comes to connoisseurship, Meredith Long & Co. operates on a level on par with the world's top art dealers. "We have reams of material," Long elaborates, "counterproofs, etchings, aquaproofs. These are objects of art in their own regard. And with these works on display, we get to watch the evolution of the artist as if she were painting on a canvas before us."
The exhibition also features little-used mediums of etching, soft-ground, drypoint and aquatint — work that was so technically innovative and luminously haunting that the series is a landmark in the medium.
And while Cassatt is most renown for her painterly canvases, Long argues that these prints are a central point of her artistic legacy. "She intuitively and completely understood the special character and unique possibilities of working on copper plates with an etcher's needle," he explains. Their pedigree is indisputable, as reflected in the works' asking price — some of which are listed for as much as $500,000.
"This is an exhibition for all of Houston to enjoy," emphasizes Meredith's daughter and colleague, Martha Long.
Visit their San Felipe showroom to catch precious glimpses of Cassatt's vision of domestic life at the dawn of modernism — intimate scenes between mother and child, private moments of women dressing — before they vanish into private Houston collections forever.
Mary Cassatt: Works on Paper is on view through May 29.
