News

By Greg Stepanich

   The American painter Mary Cassatt is best-known for her paintings of women and children, but this month at the Norton Museum, patrons have the opportunity to see four of the Impressionist artist’s works on paper.
    The four works — three pastels and an aquatint etching — are being exhibited in the West Palm Beach museum through June 30 as part of its new Masterpiece of the Month series. In June, the focus is on the Norton’s American collection, and the museum’s American art curator, Ellen Roberts, said the drawings present another way to look at this important artist’s output.
    “The public is mostly familiar with her work in the way that they are with all the Impressionists. But I think what’s important when looking at those types of works that seem so familiar to us — they’re reproduced everywhere, on posters and placemats and coasters — that it’s actually hard for us to see them for what they are,” Roberts said last month from Chicago, at whose Art Institute she worked before coming to the Norton.
    “In the case of Cassatt, she was really a radical of her time. If you look at her pictures of women and children, like these four works, they don’t look particularly radical to us. But if you look at them in comparison to other types of works that were being made at the time that were much more sentimentalized, then you realize what she’s doing that’s so new,” she said.
    The drawings are on loan to the museum from a private collection but have been promised to the Norton as a gift, Roberts said. Created from 1891 to 1908, the four drawings show intimate scenes of domestic life in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras: Women nursing babies, washing up, and sewing, and a head study of a girl wearing a bonnet.        

“Middle- and upper-class women spent most of their lives in the domestic space. Her close friend (painter Edgar) Degas would go out and paint a new kind of urban life of the streets, but Cassatt, as a well-bred woman, did not live in that world,” Roberts said.
    Born in 1844 in Pittsburgh in comfortable circumstances, Cassatt studied in Philadelphia before departing for France after the Civil War to pursue her artistic vocation, and lived there for the rest of her long life (she died in 1926). She was a member of the Impressionist circle, exhibiting and socializing with them, and in her later years became an inspirational figure to younger American and Canadian artists.
    Among her greatest achievements are her prints, Roberts said, which are inspired by Japanese art as well as the work of her fellow Impressionists. One of those works, Woman Bathing (La Toilette), is part of the exhibit, and demonstrates Cassatt’s formidable skill at draftsmanship.
    “She was a great artist. Her ability to capture the human form, and to capture the way people look when they’re living, she was a master at that, and that’s something you can really see in her works on paper,” said Roberts, who is writing a book about museum founder Ralph Norton that is expected to be out in time for the Norton’s 75th anniversary in 2016. “There’s something about the way she’s using that chalk on the paper that has an immediacy that doesn’t come across when you’re looking at a photograph of it. That’s something I hope people will appreciate about seeing the actual work.”
    The Norton Museum of Art, at 1451 S. Olive Ave. in West Palm Beach, is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, except for Thursday, when it is open from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Sunday hours are from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is $12. Palm Beach County residents get in free on the first Saturday of each month. Call 832-5196 or visit www.norton.org for more information.  
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    Theater: The words summer and theater have long gone admirably together, and while that often means park district productions or youth programs for kids out of school for the warm months, there’s still quite a bit of professional activity going on this month.
    Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach closes its 2012-13 season this month with a production of Dancing at Lughnasa, Brian Friel’s shattering study of frustrated lives in rural Ireland in 1936 (it was made into a movie with Meryl Streep in 1998). J. Barry Lewis directs a cast including Julie Rowe, Margery Lowe, Gretchen Porro, Erin Joy Schmidt, Meghan Moroney and Cliff Burgess. The play, which opened May 24, continues through June 16 at Dramaworks’ Don and Ann Brown Theatre on Clematis Street. Shows are Wednesdays through Sundays; check www.palmbeachdramaworks.org for times or call 514-4042, Ext. 2. Tickets range from $47-$55.
    Boca Raton’s Slow Burn Theatre has proven to be a nervy, inventive company in its relatively brief time hereabouts, and for its June production founders Patrick Fitzwater and Matthew Korinko have chosen The Wedding Singer, Matthew Sklar and Chad Beguelin’s musical version of the popular Adam Sandler movie from 1998 about a rock star wannabe in the 1980s who falls in love with a waitress. The show runs from June 21-30 at the West Boca Performing Arts Theater on the campus of West Boca High School. Tickets range from $20-$35; call 866-811-4111 or visit slowburntheatre.org.
    Alan Jacobson’s Plaza Theatre in Manalapan focuses on the era of platform shoes and disco balls in Rick Seeber’s jukebox revue, 8-Track: The Sounds of the ’70s. The revue will feature four singers in the music of the Carpenters, the Bee Gees, Barry Manilow, Helen Reddy, Marvin Gaye, and a host of others. (Shag rug, apparently, is optional.) The show opens June 14 at the theater, 262 S. Ocean Blvd., and runs through July 7. Tickets are $45; see www.theplazatheatre.net or call 588-1820 for showtimes.
    Finally, Florida Atlantic University’s Festival Repertory Theatre summer programs have a decidedly Stephen Sondheim bent as they open this month. The revue Side by Side by Sondheim, which collects many of the composer-lyricist’s most popular songs, opens June 22 and runs through July 7 at the University Theater on FAU’s Boca Raton campus.
    A week later, the school presents Stephen Sondheim’s 1962 musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, a racy farce set in ancient Rome that features a sparkling score including the standard Comedy Tonight. The show opens June 28 and runs through July 21. This is the 15th year of Festival Repertory Theatre, in which FAU students perform alongside professional Equity actors. Tickets are $12-$20; call 800-564-9539 or visit www.fauevents.com.