An Artist’s Work of Suffering and of Suffrage

“Today one out of every 10 paintings is sold by women; the rest are all men,” art lecturer Emilia Baer said last Wednesday at the as she began her talk on Mary Cassatt.

While men continue to dominate the world of art, women still struggle to be accepted. Cassett was one of the influential women who defied the standards for women artists during her time period.

“You have to know that in order to speak up the way Mary did, that made a lot of enemies,” Baer said. “Mary was also for women’s rights when it came to suffrage. She actually joined to group of the suffrages. And when they had the World’s Fair in Chicago she had an exhibit on the modern women.”

Cassatt lived from 1844 to 1926, spending most of her life in France. Primarily a painter and printmaker, she is mostly known for her impressionist work. According to Bear, one of Mary’s greatest accomplishments is not often recognized.

“Because of her, she got the art collectors to buy the paintings from Europe,” Baer said. “They could develop the art and have the pictures bought and brought to the United States because before that, if you wanted to see art you had to travel to Europe.”

In order to fully devote herself to her artwork, Cassatt chose to remain single.

“Mary was the type of a woman who wanted to show the world that when you become an artist you have to be serious,” Baer said. ”So, she decided you could pick one career or the other and she decided ‘I’m never getting married; I’m just going to dedicate myself to the art’.”

An art teacher, Baer continued to inform the audience about Cassatt’s life as well as dissect her paintings.

“I felt that it’s important for people that want to know about art know who the artist is,” she said. “And because I’m an artist I look at a painting different than just a historian, I look at it as an artist and then it makes more sense. I think it makes a lot of the people interested.”

Baer tours libraries giving lectures on different artists and she also teaches art classes. Her lectures vary on based on requests from libraries about specific artists and those on which she wishes to speak.

“When I have information that I think the library would want to know about… I picked Renoir because he looked at the world optimistically and these are bad times so that was a good one to go with,” Baer said.