Insta Reyog

American Artist Mary Cassatt was one of the original Impressionists, rare for an American and for a woman. Cassatt was the only American to exhibit her work in an exhibit of the original group of Impressionist Artists, including Degas, Renoir and Monet. Cassatt said that she "hated conventional art" and when invited by Edgar Degas to exhibit with this group of independent artists in an exhibit of non-academic art she was overjoyed.

Mary Cassatt was born in 1844 in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, a town that is now part of Pittsburgh. Her father was a wealthy investment banker. Cassatt grew up in Pennsylvania, but lived in Germany and France for four years during her childhood. She entered the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1861. In 1865 she studied Old Masters paintings in Paris.

Cassatt returned to the United States when the Franco-Prussian War erupted in 1870, but she went back the next year, despite her father's objections. She travelled and studied in Italy, Spain, Belgium, and France before settling permanently in Paris in 1875. She lived there for the rest of her life, despite the apparent fact that her affection for the French people was not great, and lessened with the passage of time.

In the late 1800s Paris was enormously progressive under the direction of the Emperor Napoleon III. While the city itself was undergoing dramatic modernization that made it the model for the modern world, the city's arts were bursting with enthusiasm. It was into this atmosphere that Cassatt settled.
In her early years in Paris, she exhibited at the Salon, France's annual juried exhibit which featured the best of conventional paintings of historical, religious and mythological subjects. But she grew restless with this kind of work and became enamoured of the work of the independent artists, later known as the Impressionists. Society at that time was embracing the scientific pronouncements of Darwinism and the industrial revolution was in full swing. The arts reflected the social unrest during this period of dramatic change. The Impressionists rejected the ethereal mythological subject matter of academic art, and painted life as they saw it, connecting the viewer to the biological world, and producing a very human sensibility in their work.

Cassatt's most famous paintings are of mothers with children, bathing, reading or doing other ordinary things. Despite the routine nature of the paintings, her style revealed emotional depth and intensity. She learned from Degas a sense of the immediate, allowing informal poses, gestures and fleeting moments to permeate her work.

Edgar Degas became a close friend of Cassatt's, mentored her and invited her to exhibit with the Impressionists in 1877, 1879, 1880, 1881, and 1886. She refused to exhibit there in 1882 when Degas did not exhibit. She was commissioned to do a mural for the Chicago World's Fair in 1892. After the 1886 exhibit Cassatt developed a business relationship with an art dealer named Paul Durand-Ruel who sponsored her first solo exhibit in the Durand-Ruel gallery in New York in 1893. In 1903 another showing of her work was exhibited there. She visited the United States in 1904, and for the last time in 1908.

Cassatt was influential in her support of the Impressionist movement, not just through her art, but financially, and through promotions of Impressionism. She arranged for Impressionist works to be sent to the United States through her brother Alexander. She encouraged him and others to purchase works by Monet, Manet, Morissot, Renoir and Pissaro. Alexander Cassatt ultimately became the first important art collector of Impressionist works in the United States.
Mary Cassatt died at Beaufresne, France in 1926.

1878 The Reader (Lydia Cassatt)

1890-1 The Letter

At the Francais, a Sketch

At the Theater

Autumn (Lydia Cassatt)

Breakfast in Bed

Little Girl in a Large Red Hat

Little Girl in Big Straw Hat and a Pinnafore

Lydia Seated at an Embroidery Frame

Mother and Child 1

Mother and Child XI

Mother Holding a Child in her Arms

Nude Child

Self-Portrait

The Banjo Lesson

The Bath 1

1893-94 The Boating Party

Woman and Child Seated in a Garden

Young Girl at a Window

Young Mother Sewing

. 01.45 . Unknown

Mary Cassatt

Ed Ruscha is an American artist associated with the Pop art movement. He has worked in the media of painting, printmaking, drawing, photography, and film. In this blog post I am looking at Rusha's paintings.

Born in 1937 in Omaha, Nebraska, Edward Ruscha moved to Oklahoma City in 1941 and to Los Angeles in 1956 to attend the Chouinard Art Institute. In 1962 Ruscha's work was included, along with Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Robert Dowd, Phillip Hefferton, Joe Goode, Jim Dine, and Wayne Thiebaud in the historically important and ground-breaking �New Painting of Common Objects� at the Pasadena Art Museum. This exhibition is historically considered one of the first �Pop Art � exhibitions in America.

He had his first solo exhibition in 1963 at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. At the start of the seventies, Ruscha began showing his work with the Leo Castelli in New York. He currently shows with the Gagosian Gallery in New York, Beverly Hills and London. Ruscha has consistently combined the cityscape of Los Angeles with vernacular language to communicate a particular urban experience. Encompassing photography, drawing, painting, and artist books, Ruscha's work holds the mirror up to the banality of urban life and give order to the barrage of mass media-fed images and information that confront us daily. Ruscha's early career as a graphic artist continues to strongly influence his aesthetic and thematic approach.

Ruscha has been the subject of numerous museum retrospectives, which have travelled worldwide, beginning in 1983 with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1989, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in 2000. In 2001, Ruscha was elected to The American Academy of Arts and Letters as a member of the Department of Art. The following year a major exhibition of Ruscha's entire body of work opened in Spain at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia.

In 2004, The Whitney Museum of American Art organized two simultaneous exhibitions: Cotton Puffs, Q-tips, Smoke and Mirrors: The Drawings of Ed Ruscha, which travelled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and then to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and Ed Ruscha and Photography. Also in 2004, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney mounted a selection of the artist's photographs, paintings, books and drawings that travelled to the Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo, Rome and to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Another exhibition of Ruscha's photographs was organized for the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 2006. Ruscha was the United States representative at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005. In 2009, the Hayward Gallery, London mounted a retrospective of the artist's paintings.

1958 1938

1959 Sweetwater

1960 Fulcher Frew

1962 Heavy Industry

1963 Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas

1964 Falling Chiclets

1965 N.Y.

1966 Chemical

1967 Broken Glass

1968 Lawn

1969 Bowling Ball, Olive

1974 Cotton Puffs

1980 Big Dipper

1983 Strength

1984 Untitled (Earth & Scallions)

1986 Dry Gulch

1987 Pattern of Lust

1990 Exit

1991 Inferno

1992 Blue Collar Tires

. 01.50 . Unknown

Ed Ruscha - 'Pop Artist'

The second of two posts on Abstract Expressionist painter Frank Lobdell features works from the second half of his career. See part 1 below for earlier works and biographical information on Lobdell.