![]() Far from suggesting a unified sequence or a theme and variations, Degas’s late pastels are independent works in which the repetition of form permitted both a detailed study of human anatomy and a means by which the artist could reflect on his own graphic practice. Although derived from the same pose, the slightly straighter back of the woman in figure 2 deepens the articulation of the spine, while the higher placement of her left arm allows for a more detailed study of the left deltoid and trapezius (in contrast to the articulation of the right scapula in figure 1). Degas’s handling of pastel changes to achieve these different emphases, the vigorous rose and white striations in figure 1 ceding to more blended tones (likely from dampening the pastel) and pronounced shading of the woman’s musculature in figure 2. The serial quality of Degas’s late pastels contrasts with Claude Monet’s related pictorial practice of the 1890s. Whereas Monet examined ways in which single subjects such as grainstacks or the façade of the Rouen Cathedral could be rendered in different atmospheric conditions, Degas repeated individual motifs for the purpose of generating new pictorial scenarios and showcasing how the material features of a visual artifact can impact on its meaning. Artwork in the public domain available from: the Brooklyn Museum. Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, Museum Collection Fund. 4, Edgar Degas, Woman Drying Her Hair, ca. Just as he is known to have used photographs as the starting points for certain images, so too he recycled drawings for the purpose of exploring combinatorial possibilities of form and setting while remaining committed to the depiction of the human body. įig. This strategy was not, as Richard Kendall notes, an act of simple replication, but rather a compositional practice that enabled Degas to produce “endlessly nuanced variations and some radical transformations” of a single subject. As Degas worked increasingly within the studio walls, this style of production also reduced his reliance on the presence of a model. A single drawing could, therefore, both anchor a picture and serve as the basis of a subsequent set of experiments (figs. Throughout the late works, individual bathers can be found in similar poses in different settings, portrayed in contrasting color schemes, or against divergent background fictions. Historians have examined the importance of serial thinking in Degas’s late pastels, noting in particular the repetition of form in the artist’s portrayals of ballet dancers and female nudes. Working on tracing paper ( papier calque) or pulling counterproofs of a drawing by pressing dampened paper onto its surface and transferring the resulting image to a new support enabled Degas to recontextualize motifs in myriad ways. I shall argue 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. ![]() This article examines the relevance of this technique to Degas’s practice and locates his late pastels within debates about the role of the “fragment” in mid- to late nineteenth-century art critical discourses. By employing this accretive method of construction, he systematically altered and expanded the visual field of his works during the process of their production. During the 1890s and the years immediately following the turn of the century, Degas challenged the compositional and communicative integrity of the artwork by pinning together pieces of paper, mounting them on card, and developing motifs over joins between the segments. ![]() Having used this medium to portray female ballet dancers, bathers, and horseracing scenes throughout the 1870s and 1880s, he later turned to it for the purpose of exploring ways in which an image relates to its material support. In the final decades of his career, Edgar Degas undertook an innovative set of pictorial experiments in pastel. ![]()
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