Press Release - Mona Bismarck | American Center

HISTORY OF A COLLECTION
Mary Cassatt kept all of her prints, related drawings and working proofs – traces of the different
states of her printmaking process. During the realization of a plate, from one change to another,
throughout the successive “bites,” she would make one or several proofs from a plate to appreciate
the result. These intermediary proofs, usually only a few in number, were then much more rare than
the final prints. Indeed, they were the artist’s sketches and comprise part of her creative process.
Mary Cassatt had gathered quite a vast body of prints when she decided to sell them to Ambroise
Vollard. Every step of her career was represented, from her first etchings of 1870 to her 1890s color
sets. Overall, the studio collection consisted of approximately 300 prints, drawings and
counterproofs, most of which would probably be missing today if Vollard had not kept them so
carefully.
More than twenty years separated Mary Cassatt and Ambroise Vollard (1866-1939). Born in 1866 in
La Réunion, Vollard left his native island for metropolitan France where he studied law and cultivated
his passion for art, which led him to open his own gallery in 1893.
He met Mary Cassatt in the 1890s when she was still under contract with Durand-Ruel. The art dealer
was immediately struck by the modernity and vitality of her work on paper, and by the impressions
of the many different states of her prints. Passionate for the graphic arts, Vollard worked hard to
convince the greatest artists of his time to pursue printmaking as a major activity.
His first significant deal with Cassatt dates to 1906 when Vollard went to the artist's country house in
Mesnil-Théribus, Oise. At this time, he was also working with very avant-garde artists: for instance
the first Pablo Picasso exhibition in Paris took place at his gallery, when Picasso was only 19.
Later in his career, Vollard purchased Mary Cassatt's collection of prints and drawings, most of which
had never been exhibited. These works remained in his possession until his death in 1939. Vollard
was known for buying entire studio collections from a given artist at once, and everything he bought
or published was eventually the subject of a sale. He sold many of the pastels and paintings he had
bought from Cassatt, but he kept her prints – perhaps the joy of owning them surpassed any idea of
profit.
The “studio collection,” from which the works included in this exhibition come, upon Vollard’s death
in 1939, was bought by the art dealer and collector Henri Petiet. Petiet placed a few of Cassatt's
works in the best American museums - among them the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the
National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. - so that the artist would be recognized in her native
country. The rest of the collection remained quite unknown (except to a few lucky connoisseurs).
In 2000, part of this trove was at last revealed to the public by Marc Rosen Fine Art at the Adelson
Galleries in New York. In 2004 another aspect of Mary Cassatt's experimentation was unveiled at the
same place in the exhibition Art in a Mirror: The Counterproofs of Mary Cassatt, which presented her
pastel counterproofs for the first time. In 2008, a third part of the collection was displayed at the
gallery. This exhibition marks the first time the collection is shown in Europe.
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