Mary Cassatt
"Born into the male-dominated world of nineteenth-century, middle-class Pennsylvania society, Mary Cassatt became a feminist and turned what was a lady's accomplishment into a profession as a radical painter, working in Paris and exhibiting with the Impressionists. Degas, Manet, Gauguin and Pissaro, among others, knew and admired her work, and yet, since her death in 1926, Cassatt has received little critical acclaim, while her importance, both personally as an individual artist and historically within the evolution of Impressionism, has larged been obscured. The efforts of the feminist movement in the last decade, however, have stimulated public and critical interest in Mary Cassat. Griselda Pollock examines the reasons for the unjust neglect of one of America's outstanding artistic talents, gauging the wide variety of influences which shaped her career, from her commitment in her early oils and pastels to both the techniques of the Old Masters and to modernist ideas through to her later interest in the methods of Japanese printmaking."--Jacket.