Impressions in Process and Progress

There is a short list, an expanding one, of art stars living in the Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s galleries and vaults. These are officially celebrated figures in art history whose works are proudly housed in the SBMA permanent collection. The list includes a handful of canvases by his impressionist holiness, Claude Monet — which became useful as part of last year’s blockbuster show.

Another artist of note, albeit lesser known in the impressionist pantheon, is American-in-Paris painter Mary Cassatt, a rare woman in the mostly male impressionist pack, whose lyrical canvases have often graced the museum’s walls, and are always a good friend to our visiting eyeballs.

That said, the current exhibition doesn’t deal with the more high-profile paintings, but a selection of her pastel and printworks — which she made as part of her artistic process and the fruits of which stand up on their own as artworks worthy of attention.

The exhibition is well-timed, at a time when the Cassatt’s centennial is giving rise to new appreciation and reappraisal through a major show at Chicago’s Art Institute. SBMA’s Cassatt exhibition, curated by James Glisson and fitting in one small gallery, is a much humbler presentation, but wins points for the uniqueness of its conceptual approach.

One centerpiece in the show hangs on the back wall, the mother-and-child pastel “Reine Lefebvre and Margot,” but another centerpiece is the similar but fainter “Simone in a White Bonnet.” It is a fine example of “counterproof,” in which a sheet of paper is pressed over a pastel, creating a reverse image with a paler, more restrained and even ghostly palette.

Fellow female impressionist and longtime friend and ally Berthe Morisot is represented by another pastel of a girl, “Portrait of Marthe Girardon.” The artist creates the image in a style unconcerned with meticulous finish or detail — impressionism in action, and non-action.

On the other hand, examples of Cassatt’s use of drypoint — created by scratching a needle on copperplates to generate lines, like drawing but more precise — is necessarily more sharply drawn, as seen in “Looking into a Hand Mirror,” another innocent image of a girl. Cassatt’s “On the Balcony” was created, conversely, with the soft-ground etching technique — a metal plate is coated with a waxy material, resulting in a more atmospheric effect.

Other artists and “friends” in the general impressionist circle include James McNeil Whistler, whose work here ranges from the murky etching “Nocturne-Furnace” to the more realist portraiture of “Becquel,” and the miniature etching “The Wine Glass,” by far the wee-est art in the room.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec is seen via his “action painting” lithograph at the horse races, “The Jockey.” Paul Cezanne’s color lithograph “The Large Bathers,” based on his well-known painting “Bathers at Rest,” illustrates the practice of using lithographs to complement the art market in 19th-century France. 

Art in full, living color is not the point of the exhibition, but there are two points of reference: Cassatt’s “Reine Lefebvre and Margot” and Paul-Albert Besnard’s relatively vivid “Woman with Red Hair,” which plays with mirror imagery in its double-portrait. Besnard, though a lesser-known figure of the Parisian scene, shared with Cassatt an interest in exploring print medium, as an expressive end unto itself and as a means of thinking about and marking finished art, in process and in progress.

That may be the underlying message of the medium focus at SBMA, which also plays a role in casting a larger spotlight on Cassatt in the fine art world. We’ll look at her SBMA-owned paintings with greater respect and deeper understanding going forward.

Cassatt & Friends shows at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (1130 State St.) through January 3, 2027. See sbma.net.