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The exhibition looks beyond Cassatt’s Impressionist years

The Art Institute of Chicago is examining Mary Cassatt’s later work through about 70 paintings, pastels and prints in ‘Mary Cassatt: After Impressionism.’ According to the Chicago Sun-Times report published on September 8, 2026, the exhibition is the museum’s first substantial exploration of Cassatt in more than 25 years. Marking the centenary of her death, it places a lost Chicago mural alongside the intimate subjects for which she is widely recognized.

Cassatt was born in Pennsylvania in 1844 and spent most of her life in France. Edgar Degas invited her to exhibit with the French Impressionists. That connection forms part of her story, but the exhibition follows the work beyond that association: her experiments with printmaking, her sustained attention to women and children, and an unusually large commission for a temporary exhibition building.

Curator Annelise K. Madsen told the newspaper that the exhibition offers an opportunity to reconsider an artist audiences may feel they already know. For people who follow murals, the Chicago commission provides a particularly useful entry into that reconsideration.

A World’s Fair commission put women on a monumental scale

Cassatt made ‘Modern Woman’ for the Woman’s Building at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago’s Jackson Park. Commissioned in the early 1890s, the mural measured 60 feet long and 14 feet high. She had nine months to complete it, a demanding schedule for a work on that scale.

The three-part composition contained more than 20 women and girls. Its scenes included tending an orchard, pursuing a personification of fame, and dancing and making music. These were figures engaged in activity across a large architectural setting, offering another way to approach an artist often associated with close views of domestic life.

According to the Sun-Times, the commission increased Cassatt’s visibility in the United States and placed her among the early women artists to complete a public mural in the country. Madsen also said Cassatt secured the same payment as the fair’s male muralists by asserting her claim to it.

For a public art audience, those working conditions belong in the picture. A mural’s history includes the commission, the building and the artist’s compensation, as well as the scene painted across its surface. Cassatt’s project brings those questions into the museum alongside her smaller works.

Related paintings tell the story of a missing mural

‘Modern Woman’ remains missing, and the exhibition approaches it through related easel-sized pictures. The Woman’s Building was demolished after the fair. The newspaper reports that the mural was lost or destroyed and was last accounted for in 1912; it does not establish which fate occurred.

The related paintings feature many of the same women and comparable scenes. Madsen described the exhibition’s aim as assembling the mural’s story so visitors can understand it again. These works therefore offer connections to the absent composition, rather than an encounter with the original wall painting.

That distinction matters when planning a visit around public art. Jackson Park is the historical setting of the commission, while the museum exhibition offers surviving pictures that help explain it. Reading the paintings against the mural’s dimensions and three-part structure invites visitors to consider how an image changes when it occupies a building. It also directs attention to what remains available when the building and the work no longer survive together.

‘The Child’s Bath’ connects subject matter with experimentation

Cassatt’s 1893 painting ‘The Child’s Bath’ serves as a connecting point within the exhibition. Acquired by the Art Institute in 1910, it depicts a mother washing her child’s feet. Madsen explained that the painting leads visitors toward both the printmaking section and the continued exploration of mothers and children.

The printmaking section traces Cassatt’s response to an exhibition of Japanese woodblock prints from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries that she saw in Paris. Elsewhere, repeated subjects reveal continuing changes in color, pattern and materials. Familiar figures become a way to follow technical decisions across different works.

For mural followers, a useful approach is to look closely at gesture and grouping in the related paintings, then consider the scale of the missing commission. Continue exploring surrounding murals through the Wallscape map.

Source: Chicago Sun-Times