Degas in Pieces: Form and Fragment in the Late Bather Pastels

Sculpture Journal, 2009

86 | Sculpture Journal 18.1 [2009] Degas' sculpture betrays a passion for process, structure, material, form, space, suspended movement, privacy and personal voice. Although often studied, the intended function and meaning have hitherto eluded the numerous attempts to classify or contain them. In lieu of a traditional identity as sculpture, these works seem to have been intended to defy precise definition and to enjoy a life beyond that of formal exhibition or public visual consumption. This article sets out to demonstrate that the primary key to understanding Degas' sculpture lies in the reintegration of the works into a larger personal theoretical context, and specifically to demonstrate that there are many parallels between Degas' sculpture and the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé. Consideration of Degas' works in terms of a Mallarméan theory will provide a new foundation upon which to understand Degas' quest for the ephemeral and ineffable, traits which are dominant in his sculpture. This cross-fertilization between the arts of poetry and sculpture provides the requisite clues to decode the language, structure and intended function of Degas' sculpture.

Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, 2016

Roberta Crisci-Richardson's recent biography of Edgar Degas (1834-1917) is based on her 2009 dissertation from the University of Melbourne as well as numerous articles related to the artist that she has published in a variety of journals. As the title suggests, Mapping Degas: Real Spaces, Symbolic Spaces and Invented Spaces in the Life and Work of Edgar Degas (1834-1917) proposes a "geographic and biographic approach to mapping Degas's life and work," investigating "the whereabouts, both actual and symbolic, of the artist" (184). The author maintains that her "resulting interpretation of Degas is that he was neither a classicist artist nor a conservative bourgeois, but an avant-garde artist of progressive ideals looking not to the Southern and classical models but to the art of Northern Europe, especially that of the [Dutch] Golden Age" (184). In supporting this basic premise, Crisci-Richardson organizes the book into geographic categories, including chapters on Italy and Normandy, but focusing on different aspects of Paris throughout most of the text. Following an Introduction acknowledging the extensive number of existing publications on Degas, Crisci-Richardson delves into the artists's early life in Paris. Much of this is a wellresearched compilation of current Degas literature, as is the following chapter on Italy. It is there, though, that the author introduces a recurring theme about the role of seventeenthcentury Dutch and Flemish art in shaping Degas's aesthetic. During the three years that the artist spent traveling and studying in Italy (1856-59), Crisci-Richardson notes that he developed "an appreciation of color as well as of a variety of artistic techniques, gained in the company of Gustave Moreau.[1] The second non-Italian thing he would bring to Paris was a taste for such artists as Rembrandt, Velázquez, Rubens, and most of all, Anthony van Dyck" (71). For Crisci-Richardson, this study of northern baroque masters refutes the accepted art historical understanding of Degas: "Against the vision of a Degas classicist, to which the history of art has accustomed us, it appears that it is this look northward, and the reference to the painters of the Northern Baroque that run through the painting of Degas

Word & Image, 2021

This article identifies a group of paintings by Edgar Degas as “bureau pictures,” representations of workplaces, creative or commercial, in which piles of paper are spread on desks. Through his depiction of paper, as well as his affective casting of the way in which human figures relate to their piles of paper, Degas explores the intertwined gestures of creative and bureaucratic labor. Paper’s tendency to offer a medium for fragmentation was represented in contemporary literature by Théophile Gautier and Émile Zola. In these texts and in Degas’s images, papery fragmentation takes two forms: either as a creative scattering symptomatic of an anti-classical aesthetic informed by Romanticism, or as an instrument of bureaucracy and administration, as in Zola’s representation of the stock market and the department store. Ultimately, in the bureau pictures, Degas does not take a definitive stance, but rather dwells on the way in which the two approaches intermingle, such that it is impossi...

In this paper Edgar Degas' history paintings are read as the painter's reflection on the irreconcilability of married life and artistic vocation, a major theme of discussion among artists and writers in nineteenth-century France. In The Young Spartans Exercising (1860-62) we see bachelors being banned from participation in the Gymnopaediae. In The Daughter of Jephthah (1859-60), Semiramis Building Babylon (1860-62) and Scene of War in the Middle Ages (1863-65), Degas shows famous unmarried women, femmes fortes who have chosen to pursue spiritual rather than mortal passions, all alter-egos for the artiste célibataire who chooses devotion to art over a family-centred bourgeois life. This article contributes to the view that Degas was neither a misogynist nor a narrow-minded bourgeois. Far from having preconceived patriarchal ideas on marriage and women, Degas choose to remain an artiste célibataire in accordance with the more extreme aspects of the nineteenth-century French cult of the artist as genius. It is the idea of the exceptional status of the artist that Degas elaborates in his history paintings, and that rendered him unmarriageable.

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 2010

This article analyzes ways in which Edgar Degas’s depictions of female bathers produced from the late 1870s to the 1890s suggest the presence or absence of a spectator in a manner that affects the interpretation of the works’ pictorial content. I argue that the imposition of a male gaze on Degas’s bather scenes overlooks the varied nature of spectatorship demanded by the works and, in certain cases, misconstrues the depicted fiction. I identify and contrast two subsets of representation in Degas’s bather works, one that includes a role for the viewer in connection with the visual fiction and one that does not. I shall argue that the differences between the two sets of works entail different conceptions of the act of looking that are crucial to an interpretation of the works.

Reading and understanding his poetry as an innovative and exciting medium through which he expressed themes similar to those he explored in his visual art provides the best perspective for our understanding of some aspects of his late works. The question is rather what influence these principles might have exerted over the vocabulary of his plastic arts.My analysis will thus focus on the examination of Degas's sonnets as an integral element of his overall artistic expression, a means to a dynamic end. Close analysis of Degas's themes and use of form and symbolic language reveals not only his awareness of, but also his active dialogue with,Mallarmé's theories of poetic structure, dance, and-as understood in the context of Symbolism-a symbiotic sympathy between the arts.

2015

2019

Completed in early 1944, Robert Desnos's militant series of 25 poems in Contrée evokes memories of a lost peace and calls for the defeat of the German occupiers. Suggesting the desecration of the human body by the occupiers, Picasso cut his cubist–surrealist frontispiece etching of Dora Marr to produce severed heads and dismembered body parts, feet, arms, hands and heart, and used them as fragmented tailpieces to give a visual dimension to the written poems. Reconstituting the 23 tailpieces in Contrée, as in a jigsaw puzzle, it is surprising that not one, but two copies of the frontispiece image emerge. By the multiple use of the seven fragments from one image, Picasso created tailpieces for twelve poems. From the other image, he cut tailpieces for nine poems, discarding two fragments and leaving two poems without tailpieces. This paper provides an analysis of the creation of Picasso's fragmented tailpieces and argues that the overarching text-image message propagated by Pic...