Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s (SBMA) Art lecture series Art Matters will present a talk on Mary Cassatt’s Alterity and her Radical Modernism, 3 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 13, in the Mary Craig Auditorium, 1130 State St., Santa Barbara.

Speaking about Cassatt will be Hollis Clayson, a professor emerita of art history and Bergen Evans professor emerita in the humanities from Northwestern University.

Owing to her American passport, identity as an upper-class woman, family money, and her identification with the Impressionist group in Paris, Cassatt’s choice of subjects, and the style of both her painting and intaglio printmaking were singular, SBMA said.

The lecture will focus on the radical monstrosity of Cassatt’s so-called “mother and child” pictures, and the technical virtuosity and indirection of her intaglio prints.


Clayson, who taught at Northwestern for 35 years, is a Chevalier in the Ordre des Palmes Académiques and the 2024 College Art Association Distinguished Scholar.

Clayson’s scholarship centers on diverse Paris-based art practices. Her books include “Painted Love: Prostitution in the Art of the Impressionist Era,” “Paris in Despair: Art and Everyday Life under Siege, 1870-1871,” “Is Paris Still the Capital of the Nineteenth Century? Essays on Art and Modernity, 1850-1900” (co-edited with André Dombrowski), and “Paris Illuminated: Essays on Art and Lighting in the Belle Époque.”.

She has also studied and published essays on the interior and the threshold, intaglio printmaking as an integral component of modernism, and art produced within social and political networks of transatlantic exchange.

Clayson’s current book underway is titled “The Dark Side of the Eiffel Tower.”

The talk is free to attend for students and Museum Circle members; 
$10 for SBMA members, and $15 for non-members.

For tickets, visit tickets.sbma.net.