Works by impressionist Cassatt unveiled
(Agencies)
Updated: 2004-11-03 09:43

A group of 48 never before seen pastel works by renowned American Impressionist Mary Cassatt go on show this week for the first and only time before being sold off and scattered around the world.

A group of 48 never before seen pastel works by renowned American Impressionist Mary Cassatt go on show in New York this week for the first and only time before being sold off and scattered around the world. This work is, Nude Dark-Eyed Little Girl with Mother in Patterned Wrapper, c. 1905 - 1915. Cassatt, who lived from 1844 to 1926, is one of America's best known artists of the period and played a pioneering role among the Impressionists of the late 19th century, working in Paris alongside Degas and Renoir. The pictures were originally owned by Ambroise Vollard, the famed Parisian art dealer who gave Pablo Picasso and Paul Cezanne their first one-man shows. [Reuters]

Cassatt, who lived from 1844 to 1926, is one of America's best known artists of the period and played a pioneering role among the Impressionists of the late 19th century, working in Paris alongside Degas and Renoir.

The pictures were originally owned by Ambroise Vollard, the famed Parisian art dealer who gave Pablo Picasso and Paul Cezanne their first one-man shows.

The works in the show "Art in a mirror: The counterproofs of Mary Cassatt" were created by placing a damp sheet of paper over a chalk or pastel drawing and applying pressure. A mirror image is transferred onto the second sheet of paper, including the signature of the artist in reverse, while the original drawing is left essentially unchanged.

Vollard's heirs sold the collection to a French art dealer, Henri Petiet, whom private art dealer Marc Rosen began to court in the mid-1970s. His heirs recently decided to put the collection up for sale, but before then it is going on display at New York's Adelson Galleries.

The artist has "been dead for 80 years so you don't think of a body of work popping out like this," said Warren Adelson, president of Adelson Galleries.

"We never dreamed that these things existed, this was just a revelation," Adelson told Reuters at a preview.

Before the collection came to light, there were only 22 known counterproofs by Cassatt, and experts were not even certain whether they had been made by the artist or at a later date by somebody looking to make money through a reproduction.

"Our shock when we first saw them was both the color and the scale ... they were so big and so bright," Adelson said.

FINE WINE AND MODEL TRAINS

A former senior vice president of Sotheby's, Rosen tells how he would be invited for long lunches with fine wines before being treated to a glimpse of the occasional gem from Petiet's collection.

"He was the sort of Frenchman who would start lunch with a 1949 wine and then move on to something better," Rosen said, recalling, however, that Petiet's house was surprisingly bare of important works. On display instead was a huge collection of model trains, the legacy of the family business in railways.

At that time Rosen saw only a few of the counterproofs so when Petiet's heirs finally decided to grant access to the whole collection three or four years ago, he was astonished.

"It was in a stone arcaded room in Paris, with low ceilings," he recalls with the smile of an archeologist who has unearthed an ancient treasure.

"There was the dust of 100 years on there, every time I touched something I had to go wash my hands," he says.

The 48 counterproofs were stored in two portfolios, in ideal conditions to preserve them exactly as they would have looked a century ago when they were first made.

"This exhibition is like walking into Vollard's gallery 100 years ago and seeing current works of Mary Cassatt on view," Adelson said. The show runs until mid-January, after which the works will be sold. Many are expected to go into private hands, although with price tags ranging from $50,000 to over $300,000, some may also end up in museums.

Among the group are seven counterproofs that are the only evidence of previously unrecorded pastels by Cassatt, while others were known only from black and white photographs.

The counterproof technique, which was also a favorite of Degas, softens the often highly textured surface of a pastel drawing, giving an ethereal quality to Cassatt's drawings of mothers with their children or portraits of rosy-cheeked girls in bonnets or playing with a dog.

Born in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, Cassatt is known for her pictures with maternal themes but she was no traditionalist. In 1915 she was instrumental in organizing a New York exhibition to fund the campaign to win the vote for women. She died at her chateau in France in 1926.

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