Mary Cassatt’s Alterity and her Radical Modernism

Hollis Clayson, Ph.D.
Professor Emerita of Art History and Bergen Evans Professor Emerita in the Humanities, Northwestern University

Owing to her American passport, identity as an upper-class woman, family money, and her identification with the Impressionist group in Paris, Cassatt's choice of subjects, and the style of both her painting and intaglio printmaking were singular. The lecture will focus on the radical monstrosity of her so-called "mother and child" pictures, and the technical virtuosity and indirection of her intaglio prints. It's high time we acknowledged the inventiveness of her work.

Hollis Clayson is Professor Emerita of Art History and Bergen Evans Professor Emerita in the Humanities at Northwestern University, where she taught for 35 years. She is a Chevalier in the Ordre des Palmes Académiques and the 2024 College Art Association Distinguished Scholar. Her scholarship centers on diverse Paris-based art practices, and her books include Painted Love: Prostitution in the Art of the Impressionist Era (1991), Paris in Despair: Art and Everyday Life under Siege, 1870-1871 (2002), Is Paris Still the Capital of the Nineteenth Century? Essays on Art and Modernity, 1850-1900 (2016, co-edited with André Dombrowski), and Paris Illuminated: Essays on Art and Lighting in the Belle Époque (2019). She has also studied and published essays on the interior and the threshold, intaglio printmaking as an integral component of modernism, and art produced within social and political networks of transatlantic exchange. Her current book underway is entitled The Dark Side of the Eiffel Tower.