Modern Woman: Mary Cassatt’s Mural for Chicago

In 1892, Mary Cassatt embarked on a project unlike any other in her career. She accepted a public commission to paint a monumental mural entitled Modern Woman for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The work is now lost or destroyed.

Today, we know the composition through a handful of reproductions. Cassatt also produced related paintings, pastels, and prints around the same time. Many of these artworks are in the exhibition Mary Cassatt.

After Impressionism, the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition transformed over 600 acres on Chicago's South Side into a vast fairground. The fair presented an array of exhibits on technology, manufacturing, trade history, fine art and culture. The extravagant six month event attracted more than 20 million visitors.

A coalition of women advocated for official representation at the fair, resulting in a dedicated venue called the Women's Building. Chicago art collector Bertha Palmer led the efforts to construct the Women's Building and organize its displays and programing. The space showcase fine arts, handicraft, literature, scientific inventions, higher education, organizational causes, profiles of professional women are roster of speakers, and much more.

Palmer commissioned Cassatt, a daring American artist associated with the Parisian avant garde, to paint one of the key murals in its Hall of Honor. Palmer envisioned something symbolic showing the advancement of women for the building's decorative program. She invited Mary McMahons to paint a mural on the north wall, depicting women in her primitive condition as a bearer of burdens.

She requested that Cassatt paint women in the position she occupies today for the south wall. Commissions for public murals were rare in the United States at the time. For a woman artist, this project was an unprecedented opportunity.

Cassatt embraced the mural assignments, ambitious scale, and demanding logistics. In 1892, she wrote to friend and collector Louison Havemeyer. I began to think it would be great fun to do something I had never done before.

I would not give up the idea for anything. Cassatt had nine months to complete the approximately 14 by 60ft canvas. She executed her mural at the Chateau de Villa, her rented country house.

Outside of Paris, Cassatt described the project to artists Rose lamb. I certainly did not spend the summer in singing and dancing, but in the hardest of work, Cassatt divided the composition into three parts, each featuring active women and girls in a verdant landscape. The artists described the central panel in a letter to Palmer.

Cassatt wrote, I took for the subject of the central and largest composition, Young Women Plucking the Fruits of knowledge or science on the left. Three girls chase after a flying figure personifying fame on the right. Young women practice art, music and dancing.

Cassatt rendered the approximately 20 figures who span modern woman in a naturalistic style, outfitting them in trending fashions of the 1890s engaged in everyday activities. The women and girls represent larger ideals such as knowledge, fame, and artistic expression. They are educators and cultural producers, striving and ambitious in their pursuits.

Cassatt paired her daring message with equally daring esthetics. She modeled sturdy figures within a large decorative border. She set them against flat expanses of color without shadows, and employed a bright, saturated palette.

Cassatt looked to artworks both centuries old and of the moment for inspiration. This included Italian Renaissance paintings and Japanese woodblock prints. Compositions by Post-Impressionist peers likewise inspired her.

Critics dismissed cassettes bold vocabulary, is ill suited to a mural decoration, and saw her message as evidence that Cassatt herself had overstepped the boundaries of acceptable female behavior. One journalist even called modern women impudent and brutal. Cassatt did not travel from France to see her mural installed.

Instead, once she had shipped the enormous canvas to Chicago, Cassatt focused her efforts on producing new compositions, easel sized paintings, pastels, and color prints drawn from the larger mural project. She exhibited many of these at her first retrospective in Paris in late 1893. After the World's Columbian Exposition closed in October 1893.

The mural was rolled up and placed in storage in Chicago. Its last known location dates to 1912, although it has not survived. Modern woman remains one of cassettes greatest works of art.