More often than not, the Mary Cassatt that springs to mind is an abridged edition—Impressionist painter of mothers and children. This first retrospective of the artist’s work in three decades undermines such fashioning. Curated by the Art Institute’s Judith A. Barter, the exhibition opens in Chicago with ninety paintings, pastels, and prints. Together with a catalogue of scholarly essays, Barter’s show will frame Cassatt’s scenes of domestic and public life in relation to her upper-middle-class world, her Modernist style, and the issues of her day: neo-natalism, spiritualism, the Dreyfus affair, and suffrage. Oct. 13, 1998–Jan. 10, 1999; travels to Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Feb. 14–May 9, 1999; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, June 6–Sept. 6, 1999.
