Perched atop a grassy hill overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge on San Francisco’s northwest side, the Legion of Honor is housed in a stately beaux-arts building that beautifully complements the 4,000 years of ancient and European art you’ll find inside. This year, the beloved San Francisco institution is celebrating its centennial—and it’s treating us to a very special exhibition: Mary Cassatt at Work.

Who was Mary Cassatt?

 Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) was a Modernist pioneer and member of the French Impressionist movement who’s often dismissed as a sentimental painter of mothers and children. Her paintings, pastels, and prints often depicted upper-middle-class life, showing women at the opera, talking with friends, or having tea. But Cassatt’s art also portrayed “women’s work”—including needlepoint, child-rearing, and domestic tasks—deeming it worthy of serious artistic consideration while her peers were painting landscapes and pastoral scenes from everyday life.

Under the guise of acceptably feminine imagery, Cassatt snuck in subtle experimentation with both the subject matter of her art and the processes she employed to create it. She purposefully called attention to the methods of her artmaking and the iterative approach she took to reach the final product, which the exhibition at Legion of Honor highlights beautifully.

About the exhibition

Mary Cassatt at Work is the first major U.S. presentation of Cassatt’s work in more than 25 years, organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in collaboration with the Fine Art Museums of San Francisco.

The exhibition delves into Cassatt’s materials and processes over 50 years of artmaking, showing 93 objects on loan plus a group of distinguished works from the Fine Arts Museums’ collection. You don’t want to miss this one!

Get a taste of what’s to come

The exhibition is split into five galleries, each tailored to a central theme of Mary Cassatt’s artwork and artistic process. Take a stroll through the museum with us as we give you a glimpse into each gallery.

Impressionism: Picturing Women

Cassatt’s desire to become a professional artist was met with a lot of resistance from both her family and her social class at large. Nonetheless, she remained intent on developing her artistic career.

Cassatt found her community with the Impressionists—artists like Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Auguste Renoir, and Camille Pissarro—who broke away from traditional French art institutions and pioneered new approaches to portray scenes from modern life, often rendered with bold strokes of bright, unblended color.

As an affluent woman navigating rigid Parisian society, Cassatt focused her artistic attention on depicting the social lives, intellectual interests, and handiwork of the women she called her peers. Cassatt showed her work with the Impressionists for the first time in 1879, making an impactful debut with her paintings and pastel drawings of upper-middle-class women.

Children and Childcare

Even though Cassatt never had children of her own, she took great interest in portraying the inner lives of children and the relationships they had with their caretakers. Because Cassatt poignantly depicted the physical and psychological work involved in childcare for the first meaningful time in Western art history, she quickly garnered an international reputation—and established a budding market—for her images of women and children.

Printing in Color

After attending a Japanese art exhibition in Paris in 1890, Cassatt became enamored with the bright colors, dynamic patterns, and everyday scenes of Japanese woodblock prints. She was determined to reverse engineer these elements in a Western-style intaglio print. The next winter, she created a series of color prints now known as the “Set of Ten,” which drew from Japanese precedents to depict Parisian women’s private lives, from quiet bus rides to nighttime bath rituals.

Cassatt worked closely with the master printer Modeste Leroy to invent a new method of printing in color, resulting in some of the most inventive and technically adventurous works in the history of modern printmaking.

Finished/Unfinished

Cassatt loved to lay her process bare in her color prints, paintings, and pastel drawings. This gallery highlights the artist’s endless experimentation and her desire to document the artistic process in addition to the final product.

The “Modern Madonna”

During the last 15 years of her life, Cassatt became increasingly focused on creating artwork about women and children. This mother-and-child imagery helped Cassatt start a conversation around Old Master precedents—specifically, the religious images of the Madonna and Christ Child depicted by Italian Renaissance masters.

But Cassatt’s ability to create endlessly varied compositions from this theme also connects her late work to fellow Impressionists Claude Monet and Paul Cézanne, who treated the same subjects (water lilies and apples, respectively) again and again.

Event details:

Where: Legion of Honor (100 34th Ave., San Francisco, CA 94121)

When: Oct. 5, 2024-Jan. 26, 2025

Hours: 9:30 am-5:15 pm, Tuesday through Sunday; Closed on Mondays

Tickets: $20 for adults, $17 for seniors (65+), $11 for students (w/ valid ID), Free for youth (17 and under) and Legion of Honor members

Pro tip: Skip the line and book your tickets online.

Tamara de Lempicka—the first retrospective exhibition in the U.S. dedicated to the artist’s full oeuvre—reveals a new perspective on her life and design practice. It’s easy to see how her paintings, combining a classical figural style with the modern energy of international avant-garde, have cemented Lempicka as one of Art Deco’s defining painters, with an enduring influence on today’s pop culture landscape. Come to San Francisco to see this landmark exhibition!

About Tamara de Lempicka

Born Tamara Rosa Hurwitz (1894-1980) to a Polish family of Jewish descent, she grew up in Saint Petersburg. There she met her first husband, Tadeusz Łempicki, from whom she took the feminine declension Lempicka and altered it to the more noble “de Lempicka.” Following the October Revolution in 1917, they fled to Paris. There she signed her early works under the masculinized name “Łempitzky.” Many believed her to be a man and for a time that suited her goal of being recognized as an important artist. Lempicka created a public image as flawless as the glossy surfaces of her paintings and became the toast of the town. de Lempicka’s style was singular: “Among a hundred paintings, you could always recognize mine,” she said.

Lempicka and Tadeusz Łempicki divorced in 1929, and in 1934 she married Baron Raoul Kuffner de Dioszegh. They left Europe for the United States just before the start of World War II. The artist, now Baroness Kuffner, became a favorite of Hollywood celebrities—yet her work fell out of favor until the 1970s, when the ever-resilient de Lempicka was rediscovered as a leading figure of Art Deco. Today, she stands out as one of the most receptive, gifted, and technically accomplished painters of her generation.

About the exhibition

Tamara de Lempicka unfolds chronologically in four major chapters that mark the stages in the artist’s life through her changing identity: Tamara Rosa Hurwitz, Monsieur Łempitzky, Tamara de Lempicka, and Baroness Kuffner. The different sections of the exhibition present the evolution of her artistic style and give the viewer an amazing opportunity to realize the most prevalent themes of her work.

Tamara Rosa Hurwitz

Shortly after marrying Tadeusz Łempicki at the age of 22, they left for Paris. Here, Lempicka enrolled at free academies in the artistic community of Montparnasse, where she took classes from André Lhote, a French painter

whose tempered interpretation of Cubism and emphasis on figurative drawing were highly influential to her developing style. Her first works were still lifes and portraits of her friends, as she honed her skills and developed an appreciation for sensual figurative forms.

Monsieur Łempitsky

In the early 1920s, when Lempicka first exhibited at the Parisian salons, she signed her works using the masculine version of her surname Łempitzky, purposefully blurring her gender identity. The salons were open to both men and women, but the juries, critics, and buyers who could ensure an artist’s success were predominantly men. During her first solo exhibition in 1925, she presented a gallery of modern aristocracy in her distinctive portraiture style.

Tamara de Lempicka

By 1930, Lempicka had cemented her cool, high-gloss pictorial style. Her female portraits, in particular, reflected the optimism of an era when women began enjoying greater social and economic access and prominence.

Baroness Kuffner

In 1939, under the impending threat of Nazi invasion, Lempicka and her second husband, Baron Raoul Kuffner, left Europe for the U.S. Living in Los

Angeles and New York, and ultimately joining her daughter, Kizette, in Houston, she strove for an artistic comeback as Baroness Kuffner. The American press nicknamed her the “baroness with a brush.” Lempicka shifted from glamorous portraits to religious paintings and humble still lifes inspired by the Old Masters. Mixed reviews of her series of solo exhibitions lead her to withdraw from pursuing her painting career.

Be sure to see…

Within the galleries of the exhibition, you’ll find special collections significant to Tamara de Lempicka’s story, including:

Kizette de Lempicka, A Model Daughter

Marie-Christine “Kizette” de Lempicka was born in Saint Petersburg in 1916, a few months after Tamara married Tadeusz. Lizette served as a model for her mother and garnered Lempicka’s first critical notice. They had a strained relationship given Lempicka’s desire for an independent lifestyle. Lizette remained in her mother’s life and was responsible for caring not only for her mother but also for her mother’s legacy.

Ira Perrot: Poet, Muse, Lover

Married to men and open about her bisexuality, Lempicka enjoyed a greater degree of freedom in the period between the World Wars. The poet Ira Perrot is the subject of many of Lempicka’s paintings, drawings, and poems during this time.

Nudes: Tradition and Transgression

Traditionally a male painter’s domain created for the pleasure of other men, female nudes were a genre where Lempicka could garner recognition from critics and clientele alike. Lempicka’s nudes exude sexuality in their authentic depiction of women’s bodies in realistic settings.

About the exhibition

Where: Legion of Honor (100 34th Ave., San Francisco, CA 94121)

When: Now through Feb. 9, 2025

Hours: 9:30 am-5:15 pm, Tuesday through Sunday; Closed on Mondays

Tickets: $20 for adults, $17 for seniors (65+), $11 for students (w/ valid ID), Free for youth (17 and under) and Legion of Honor members

Tamara de Lempicka is the first scholarly museum retrospective of the artist’s work in the U.S., exploring Lempicka’s artistic influences and revealing the process behind works that have become synonymous with Art Deco.

After its presentation at the de Young, the exhibition will travel to Houston and be on display at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, March 9 through May 26, 2025.

PRO TIP: Skip the line and book your tickets online https://www.famsf.org/visit/de-young-tickets-hours