Word: cassatt
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...National Museum of Women in the Arts is a virtuous bore. Until ten years ago, with a few resolute exceptions like Georgia O'Keeffe, Mary Cassatt and Louise Nevelson, women artists were shabbily treated by American museums and either omitted from their collections or treated as token presences. The idea that art by women was necessarily second rate lingered discreetly in some quarters through the '70s. Today it is gone, at least in America. Apart from political enlightenment, one of the things that killed it was the growth of the art market. Now that any list of collectors' favorites...
...collection has some indubitably good things in it. Its highlights run from Rembrandt Peale's stiff but historically interesting Porthole Portrait of George Washington and Samuel Morse's The Gallery of the Louvre to a good Eakins, a vigorous Mary Cassatt of boaters feeding ducks, and a set of admirable monotypes by Maurice Prendergast. There is also some very minor work by famous names (Homer, Martin Johnson Heade, John Frederick Kensett) and a plethora of those 1890s contre-jour pictures of nice Boston girls in flowing chiffon scarves -- genteel provincial salon painting that has been revived as a market craze...
...exchange for the Russian paintings, the U.S. will send 65 American paintings from approximately the same time period--including works by Mary Cassatt, Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent--to Leningrad and Moscow museums...
...Bugs Bunny cartoons), Phil Spector (The Ronettes, The Righteous Brothers) and Aaron Spelling (The Love Boat, Dynasty) that make them unmistakably American artifacts? To a good part of the rest of the world, the U.S. is nothing but its global pop gush. Not the Bill of Rights, not Mary Cassatt, not George Balanchine but Madonna, The A-Team and Sidney Sheldon. The respectable pieties are correct: sure, America is the land of freedom and the land of opportunity. But it is perhaps more lovably the land of great tap dancing and terrific special effects, the land of oomph...
...century American painting to its home audience, as well as to the city of Ingres, Delacroix and Manet, could have been better done. What the French will make of it, of course, is an open question, since the only premodern American artists known in France are Whistler, Eakins and Cassatt...