Edgar Degas

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Degas and the Nude Text by Xavier Rey, Anne Roquebert, George T.M. Shackelford. Interview with Lucian Freud by Martin Gayford. The nude figure was critical to the art of Edgar Degas throughout his life, and yet frequently his expansive body of work on this subject has been overshadowed by his celebrated
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MFA PUBLICATIONS
ISBN: 9780878467730
$65.00 | In stock

Edgar Degas: The Late Work Edited by Martin Schwander. Text by Carol Armstrong, Jonas Beyer, Richard Kendall, Martin Schwander, Mareike Wolf-Scheel. While Edgar Degas has long been considered one of the major pioneers of modern art, exhibitions of his work remain a surprisingly rare occurrence, and the enduring popularity of the beautiful”
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HATJE CANTZ
ISBN: 9783775734431
$75.00 | In stock

Edgar Degas

Edgar Degas: The Late Work

Edited by Martin Schwander. Text by Carol Armstrong, Jonas Beyer, Richard Kendall, Martin Schwander, Mareike Wolf-Scheel.
Published by Hatje Cantz

While Edgar Degas has long been considered one of the major pioneers of modern art, exhibitions of his work remain a surprisingly rare occurrence, and the enduring popularity of the “beautiful” paintings of his Impressionist phase can obscure the overall complexity of his oeuvre. But Degas experimented with various media—drawing and printing techniques, pastel, photography, sculpture—throughout his life, and, after putting Impressionism behind him in 1880, he reached the undoubted culmination of his art in his daring and unique late work. In the artworks he created between 1890 and 1912, the delicate, detailed painting of his mature period gives way to an unbridled pleasure in technical experimentation and an obsessive creativity that increasingly liberates the means of depiction from any straightforward representational function. As if in a dreamlike state, Degas conflates past and present, things seen and remembered, to create his renowned depictions of dancers and female nudes, jockeys and racehorses, landscapes and portraits. Edgar Degas: The Late Work is the first publication to present a comprehensive overview of the technical diversity and wide range of themes in Degas’ oeuvre, and is published to coincide with an exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen/Basel.
A founder of the French Impressionist movement, Edgar Degas (1834–1917) began to paint early in life, possessing a studio by the age of 18, and working primarily in history painting up until 1864, when he met Manet (while both were copying the same Velázquez portrait in the Louvre, according to legend). In 1872 he lived in New Orleans, producing several portraits of his extended family there. By the 1880s, his works commanded sufficient prices to permit him to collect works by many of his contemporaries, as well as older masters such as El Greco, Ingres and Delacroix.

Degas and the Nude

Text by Xavier Rey, Anne Roquebert, George T.M. Shackelford. Interview with Lucian Freud by Martin Gayford.
Published by MFA Publications

The nude figure was critical to the art of Edgar Degas throughout his life, and yet frequently his expansive body of work on this subject has been overshadowed by his celebrated portraits and dancers. Degas and the Nude is the first book in a generation to explore the artist's treatment of the nude from his early years in the 1850s and 1860s, through his triumphs in the 1880s and 1890s, all the way to his last decades when the theme dominated his artistic production in all media. With essays by leading American and French critics, it provides a new interpretation of Degas' evolving conception of the nude, situating it in the subject's broader context among his peers in nineteenth-century France. It explores how Degas exploited all of the body's expressive possibilities, how his vision of the nude informed his notion of modernity, and how he abandoned the classical or historical form in favor of a figure seen in her own time and setting--whether engaged in overtly carnal acts or just stepping out of an ordinary bath. More than 200 lushly rendered full-color images present a re-seeing of Degas' subject in paintings, pastels, drawings, prints and sculpture. Among them are the most important of Degas' early paintings of nudes, Scene of War in the Middle Ages, which exerted a lifelong influence on the artist's treatment of the female nude and includes poses repeated throughout his career; monotypes of the late 1870s, almost caricature-like in their imagery, illustrating Degas' most explicitly sexual depictions of women in Parisian brothels; and a number of pictures portraying the daily life of women wherever they may reside. Together these iterations range over more than a half-century of genius achievement and present a groundbreaking look at the evolution of this master artist.