Medium Matrix Materiality: Mary Cassatt’s Aquatint Suite

This paper concerns the suite of ten japoniste aquatints that Mary Cassatt exhibited at the Galeries Durand-Ruel in Paris in 1891. Derived from a chapter draft belonging to a larger book project, Medium Matrix Materiality, which revisits the old question of “medium specificity” from a ground-up, practice-specific point of view, it will address the materiality of the medium of printmaking as it arises in Cassatt’s 1891 aquatint series from several vantage-points. It will consider, first, the apparently dematerialized quality of printmaking in all its forms, as well as the complexity and hiddenness of its material process, deploying Cassatt’s series to contest William Ivins’s famous teleology of the “exactly repeatable pictorial statement,” and expanding instead on Jennifer Roberts’s emphasis on “two surfaces in contact” as one of the medium’s defining characteristics. It will explore print’s connection to drawing, the chain of relations between states, plates and seriality, and the significance of the processes of inversion and reversal as they play out in Cassatt’s work. More specifically, it will investigate the distinctiveness of etching/aquatint as a subspecies of the print, and the ways in which Cassatt’s series performs an act of translation, at both the material and the cultural levels, from the relief-based language of the late 18th-century Japanese woodcut into the intaglio mode of the late 19th-century French-modernist aquatint. It will develop the matrilineal etymology of the concept of the matrix, as it unfolds most evidently in the drypoint state of the maternally-themed images in Cassatt’s series. And finally, it will argue that the several pictorial themes of Cassatt’s 1891 suite allegorize all of these aspects of the materiality of the print medium, along with the relation between the private printing press and the limited release of its images out into the public world.