On Not Explaining Late Degas

Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, 2018

This article examines how Edgar Degas challenged the compositional and communicative integrity of the artwork by pinning together pieces of paper, pasting them on card, and developing motifs over joins between the segments. Through a close reading of Degas’s late bather pastels, the article locates Degas’s accretive working method within debates about the role of the “fragment” in mid- to late nineteenth-century art critical discourses. It is argued that focusing on Degas’s decision to create works “in pieces” is important for understanding both his place in nineteenth-century art history and the legacy of his oeuvre in European modernism.

I. In his attitude toward the technical aspects of his art, Degas was at once more radical and more conservative than almost any major artist of his generation. While the other Realists and Impressionists were largely content to employ the most conventional techniques of European art, even as they brought about the most far-reaching changes in its content and formal structure, he experimented constantly with materials and methods whose novelty would match that of his vision of modern life. But on the other hand, while his colleagues accepted the limitations of the relatively simple traditional techniques they used, enjoying the spontaneity of expression these afforded, he longed for the virtuosity and mystery he associated with the more complex methods of the old masters, blaming their loss on the shallow materialism of his own age. He could delight in the search for new procedures and remark with disdain, when told of another artist's satisfaction at having "found" his method, "Heureuse-ment que moi, je n'ai pas trouve ma maniere; ce que je m'embeterais."' But he could also despair of his ignorance , asserting to the young Rouault, "a propos de

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

Oxford Art Journal, 1993

Word and 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 impossible to distinguish clearly between an artist's or an author's work and that of a clerk, at least at the level of the gestures and the handling of pieces of paper. In a move typical of Modernist aesthetics, however, paint and compositional choices strike back in order to submerge paper in the user's coin (corner), as a "true fragment" impressed with the mark of artistic temperament. KEYWORDS bureaucracy, office, Edgar Degas, Émile Zola, Théophile Gautier I was, or I seemed, hard with all the world, by a kind of urge to brutality caused by my doubts and my bad humor. I felt so ill-made, so ill-equipped, so soft, while it seemed to me that my artistic calculations were so correct. I sulked against everybody and against myself. 1

and led them to create in Harrison's words, a "studio filled up with large pictures of cunts." And he continues, "For a while, it was these, rather than the process of masking, that claimed autonomy of a kind, though-if this is not a contradiction-it was in their very stylistic degeneracy that their self-sufficiency seemed to lie" (p. 137). This gives a sample of Harrison's somewhat unusual style of art writing. "Masking" refers to the coverings that were made to hide the original Courbet painting from a viewer who might be shocked; it also refers to the coy attitudes of Khali-Bey, who commissioned it and hid it behind a landscape of Courbet, and to the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, into whose possession it came and who hid it behind a painting by Andre Masson (p. 135). At least there are moments of entertainment hidden in this history of art! The final section, "Whose Looking," raises questions that have preoccupied several American aestheticians. Harrison, rather than musing over the end of art, as we do, titles his essay "Painting and The Death of The Spectator" (pp. 171-191). He begins with this provocative statement: "The question whether anyone should persist with painting as an art hangs over this book, as of many others concerned with the practical and theoretical circumstances of art in general at the end of the twentieth century and the outset of the twenty first" (p. 171). Conditions that, in his opinion, would justify painting into the future would be reasons to "persist with the making of pictures," and an audience who would find them "edifying." He is frightened by the production of "blank painting" in our time and seems to be haunted by the Balzac story, "The Unknown Masterpiece." Underlying his anxiety is the conviction that painting must realize "imaginative perception" through which it delivers both knowledge and strong feeling to the viewer. That is, he sees the need for theory to be generated within and through painting itself and not imposed upon it by philosophical ideas of the sort that modernism itself tried to escape. It will be helpful to the reader if Harrison's examples are set alongside Danto's example of a set of red rectangles, intended to demonstrate the role of theory in interpretation of a set of objects exactly alike (see The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, chap. 1). Harrison's response to this problem is the statement, "If any blank surface can be 'a painting' ... how can painting any longer claim to be the occasion for significant acts of critical discrimination?" (p. 181). In contrast, Danto's analysis shows that painting itself generates philosophical interpretations, and often must be interpreted by the viewer through a philosophical structure. Harrison, whose presuppositions are different from Danto's, insists that painting is a "socially significant activity ... that involves cooperation, exchange, self-criticism, and learning," all contributing to what he calls "a culture of ideological resistence" (p. 173). What he means, I think, is that painting must, in a kind of Deweyan sense, be actively fruitful in the lives of the perceiver. And if that is no longer possible, then painting is at an end, or should be given up. One gets the impression that Harrison feels bereft in the postmodern-anythinggoes world he sees about him and that the Art & Language movement sees itself in its explorations as marking the end of a historical process culminating in the death of the spectator.