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拍品專文
This sketch of Margot in a bonnet, executed just after the turn of the century, exemplifies Cassatt's late period. It was only when she was in her fifties that Cassatt received the acclaim in Europe and America, that her male Impressionist colleagues such as Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Camille Pissarro had already been accorded a decade earlier. Her retrospective exhibition at Galerie Durand-Ruel, Paris, in 1893, included sixty-five graphic works alongside paintings, pastels and drawings; and her first solo exhibition in America, two years later at Durand-Ruel's New York gallery, was a critical and commercial success. When Cassatt traveled to America in 1898-1899, her first trip there in more than twenty years, she was acknowledged as one of America's most important living artists.
Cassatt's new stature affected both her style and scale of production. "She began to produce and distribute more works than ever before to meet the demand" (N.M. Mathews, Mary Cassatt, New York, 1987, p. 121). Working at a fast pace, Cassatt's drawings, pastels, oil sketches, and paintings took on a new freshness and spontaneity. Sketch of Head of Margot in a Bonnet Looking to the Right displays the exuberance and radial composition typical of Cassatt's quickly rendered works. Using a face as the center point, Cassatt often used hats and torso definition to direct the eye upwards and downwards. Her jagged, gestural strokes are germane to the more painterly, baroque, style she used in this period, and the bright turquoise pigment suggests a new Post-Impressionist boldness that began to appear in her work. The color in the upper left quadrant, however, does not conform to any overall shape, and unlike most of Cassatt's sketches, the only feature of the face drawn in high relief is the girl's nose. These indistinct elements, combined with the overlap of colors where the bonnet meets the girl's hair, make this sketch of Margot one of Cassatt's most notably modern and forward-looking works.
Although the mother and child was Cassatt's signature subject, she turned away from typology in this period to focus on individual children. These works are more pensive and introspective, reflecting Cassatt's increased interest in child maturation and psychology. "Cassatt embarked on a series of pastels, drawings, and drypoints of children that preoccupied her for the rest of her working career. She had painted children many times before, but there had always been an obvious incentive, either a portrait commission or contact with her young nieces and nephews. This series seems to have had no such motivation. The era Freud ushered in had a new attitude: the child became the unconscious repository of adult characteristics. To some extent Cassatt's exploration of the child-not the baby-in adult costume, pose, and expression reflects aspects of early-twentieth-century psychology, absorbed by Cassatt in her wide reading of sociological, psychological and parapsychological literature" (op. cit., p. 125).
Cassatt engaged children from the nearby village as models, since her nieces and nephews were now older than her preferred age of five or six years. The subject of this work is Margot Lux, a young girl from the neighborhood of Mesnil-Théribus whom she frequently depicted. It was partly this anonymity, the obscurity of her local models as opposed to traditional portrait sitters, that enabled the abstracted rendering and precocious glances evident here. Margot's attention appears piqued by an object outside the frame, which brings acuity to her opaque brown eyes. These contrasts with the generous, textured application of crayon around her face which attributes an implicit softness to the figure. The face, which is literally vacant of pigment except for the highlights, is thus ominously foregrounded. Here, in a prescient coupling, the beginnings of psychological deconstruction are represented by the prefiguring of formal fragmentation.
This pastel will be included in the Cassatt Committee's revision of Adelyn Dohme Breeskin's catalogue raisonné of the works of Mary Cassatt.
Cassatt's new stature affected both her style and scale of production. "She began to produce and distribute more works than ever before to meet the demand" (N.M. Mathews, Mary Cassatt, New York, 1987, p. 121). Working at a fast pace, Cassatt's drawings, pastels, oil sketches, and paintings took on a new freshness and spontaneity. Sketch of Head of Margot in a Bonnet Looking to the Right displays the exuberance and radial composition typical of Cassatt's quickly rendered works. Using a face as the center point, Cassatt often used hats and torso definition to direct the eye upwards and downwards. Her jagged, gestural strokes are germane to the more painterly, baroque, style she used in this period, and the bright turquoise pigment suggests a new Post-Impressionist boldness that began to appear in her work. The color in the upper left quadrant, however, does not conform to any overall shape, and unlike most of Cassatt's sketches, the only feature of the face drawn in high relief is the girl's nose. These indistinct elements, combined with the overlap of colors where the bonnet meets the girl's hair, make this sketch of Margot one of Cassatt's most notably modern and forward-looking works.
Although the mother and child was Cassatt's signature subject, she turned away from typology in this period to focus on individual children. These works are more pensive and introspective, reflecting Cassatt's increased interest in child maturation and psychology. "Cassatt embarked on a series of pastels, drawings, and drypoints of children that preoccupied her for the rest of her working career. She had painted children many times before, but there had always been an obvious incentive, either a portrait commission or contact with her young nieces and nephews. This series seems to have had no such motivation. The era Freud ushered in had a new attitude: the child became the unconscious repository of adult characteristics. To some extent Cassatt's exploration of the child-not the baby-in adult costume, pose, and expression reflects aspects of early-twentieth-century psychology, absorbed by Cassatt in her wide reading of sociological, psychological and parapsychological literature" (op. cit., p. 125).
Cassatt engaged children from the nearby village as models, since her nieces and nephews were now older than her preferred age of five or six years. The subject of this work is Margot Lux, a young girl from the neighborhood of Mesnil-Théribus whom she frequently depicted. It was partly this anonymity, the obscurity of her local models as opposed to traditional portrait sitters, that enabled the abstracted rendering and precocious glances evident here. Margot's attention appears piqued by an object outside the frame, which brings acuity to her opaque brown eyes. These contrasts with the generous, textured application of crayon around her face which attributes an implicit softness to the figure. The face, which is literally vacant of pigment except for the highlights, is thus ominously foregrounded. Here, in a prescient coupling, the beginnings of psychological deconstruction are represented by the prefiguring of formal fragmentation.
This pastel will be included in the Cassatt Committee's revision of Adelyn Dohme Breeskin's catalogue raisonné of the works of Mary Cassatt.