Rendez-Vous de l'Alliance with Ruth Iskin

The Friendship of Mary Cassatt with Edgar Degas

Professor of Art History Ruth E. Iskin’s lecture, drawn from her new book Mary Cassatt between Paris and New York, will shed important new light on the relationship between Cassatt, the American-born artist who became a central figure among the Impressionists, and Edgar Degas, one of the group’s leaders. Not only close colleagues, the two artists were also personal friends, and Iskin’s lecture will explore the remarkable relationship between these two innovative artists, both of whom defied the artistic and personal conventions of their day. After her lecture, she and Tulane Associate Professor of Art History Michelle Foa, who is completing a book on Degas, will discuss these two fascinating artists, their professional dialogue and collaborations, and how both their closeness and Degas’s depictions of Cassatt help challenge the persistent misconceptions about his attitudes towards and representations of women.

More about the talk:
Analyzing artworks and photographs of and by Cassatt and Degas, Iskin will explore the two artists' relationship as well as the stereotypes, rumors, and myths that have long shaped how they and their work have been viewed. Although the correspondence between Degas and Cassatt has not survived, letters by each artist to their respective friends and anecdotes by those close to them uncover important and nuanced facets of their friendship. Iskin will also situate their relationship within the broader contexts of French and American culture of the time, including the Impressionist group’s dedication to artistic innovation, the gender dynamics of the fin de siècle emergence of the New Woman, and the controversies that surrounded the issue of women’s equality. 

Ruth E. Iskin, before authoring Cassatt between Paris and New York: The Making of a Transatlantic Legacy, published several books, including Modern Women and Parisian Consumer Culture in Impressionist Painting and The Poster: Art, Advertising, Design, and Collecting, 1860s-1900s. She has also published numerous articles and museum catalogue essays, and her work has been translated into eight languages.    

Michelle Foa is Associate Professor of Art History at Tulane.  Her first book, Georges Seurat: The Art of Vision, was published in 2015 by Yale University Press. She is finishing her second book, Edgar Degas and the Matter of Art, which is under advance contract with Yale.  She has been awarded numerous prestigious research fellowships for her work, and last year she co-curated the exhibition Edgar Degas: Multi-Media Artist in the Age of Impressionism at the Clark Art Institute.

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 Mary Cassatt between Paris and New York: The Making of a Transatlantic Legacy
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More about the presenter:
Ruth E. Iskin’s current book, Mary Cassatt between Paris and New York: The Making of a Transatlantic Legacy, is the first complerensive study of Cassatt’s life, work, and legacy through the prism of a transatlantic framework. Her first book, Modern Woman and Parisian Consumer Culture in Impressionist Painting, shed new light on the Impressionists’ representations of women as Parisian consumers and creators of fashion and as spectators and workers at café concerts. Iskin’s second book, The Poster: Art, Advertising, Design, and Collecting, 1860s-1900s, was described by critics as “a landmark in art historical studies,” the “definitive study of the poster” and “a towering monument” that “sets the standard for future studies.” Iskin is the editor of Re-envisioning the Contemporary Art Canon: Perspectives in a Global world, and co-editor of Collecting Prints, Posters, and Ephemera. She has published numerous articles in jounrals, books, and museum exhibition catalogues, and her writings have been translated into eight languages. Iskin holds a PhD from UCLA, has taught art history in the US and in Israel, and is Professor Emerita of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Department of the Arts.

More about the guest speaker:
Michelle Foa is associate professor of nineteenth-century European art in the Art Department of Tulane University. Her first book, Georges Seurat: The Art of Vision, was published in 2015 by Yale University Press. Her second book, Edgar Degas and the Matter of Art, is under contract with Yale, and an article on Degas in New Orleans published in The Art Bulletin was awarded the 2022 Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Article Prize.  Other articles on the artist are forthcoming in the journals Art History and West 86^th, and last year co-curated the exhibition Edgar Degas: Multi-Media Artist in the Age of Impressionism at the Clark Art Institute.

Her work has been supported by numerous fellowships and grants, including from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, where she was a Samuel H. Kress Senior Fellow, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, where she was the Florence Gould Foundation Fellow, and the Institut national d'histoire de l'art (the French National Institute for Art History).

She is Vice President of the National Committee for the History of Art and on the organizing committee for the quadrennial conference of the Comité international d’histoire de l’art (the International Committee for Art History).  She also serves as the Programs Chair for the Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art.