Framed --- Day 13/283

Walk: Legion of Honor (press preview of Mary Cassatt at Work)

Distance: 1.8 miles, As little as possible in current heat wave

Mary Cassatt, Woman in a Loge, 1879, oil on canvas

At last, after nearly 150 years, a Mary Cassatt exhibition that doesn't focus on the sentimental darlingness of much of her subject matter

and examines instead Cassatt's seriousness as an artist, technical inventiveness, experimentation, and proficiency across many art mediums from oil, to pastel, to printmaking.

A quick way to get a glimpse at how revolutionary Cassatt was is to look at the frames around the paintings and pastels in the show.  All of them are ornate and gold with one exception: the green one above that frames Cassatt's Woman in a Loge.  

The gold ones were framed by dealers.

Mary Cassatt, In the Loge, 1878, oil on canvas

Which, truth be told, was a necessity in order to sell them to a Parisian public who were, if not scandalized by the new, impressionist art, highly resistant to taking it seriously as art.  But, gold frames, the more ornate the better, they did understand.  Anything in them could be considered art and hung without embarrassment on home walls.

Cassatt knew this but still persisted in creating her own frames.  She felt they were an extension of the art, not just ornate boxes.  She painted them in various colors - lilac, yellow, green like above, whatever shade she felt enhanced and carried the feeling of her work.  And for this she was punished in print by reviewers who called the frames garish and 'modern.' 

That last, modern, was of course meant as ultimate condemnation at the time.  But today thoughtfully framing a work in a way that enhances it is exactly how it is done.  It is modern and a prime example of how far ahead of her time Cassatt was.