“The Sunflower’s Bloom of Women’s Equality”: New Contexts for Mary Cassatt’s La Femme au tournesol
Panorama, June 2022
This article reconsiders Mary Cassatt’s c. 1905 painting La Femme au tournesol [Woman with a Sunflower] in relation to the artist’s devotion to women’s rights and the fight for suffrage in the early twentieth century. Connecting the titular sunflower to its prominence as the official symbol of the American suffrage movement, I argue that Cassatt’s work can only be fully understood when read in a feminist context. Relying on her correspondence and further archival research, the article draws into constellation Cassatt’s feminist activities, her exhibition practices, the painting’s provenance, and history of titles to reconstruct not only the painting’s original meaning, but also the story of its erasure by art historians, critics, and curators over the course of a century.