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PUBLISHER
The Museum of Modern Art, New York

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 8 x 10 in. / 224 pgs / 230 color.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date
Out of stock indefinitely

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: SPRING 2016 p. 7   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9781633450059 TRADE
List Price: $50.00 CAD $67.50

AVAILABILITY
Not available

TERRITORY
NA ONLY

EXHIBITION SCHEDULE

New York
The Museum of Modern Art, 03/25/16–07/24/16

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THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK

Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty

Edited with text by Jodi Hauptman. Text by Carol Armstrong, Jonas Beyer, Kathryn Brown, Karl Buchberg, Hollis Clayson, Samantha Friedman, Richard Kendall, Laura Neufeld, Stephanie O'Rourke, Raisa Rexer, Jill de Vonyar.

Edgar Degas: A Strange New BeautyA towering figure in 19th-century art, Degas is best known as a painter and chronicler of the ballet. Yet his work in monotype reveals the true extent of his restless experimentation. In the mid-1870s, Degas was introduced to the monotype process, a technique in which the artist draws in ink on a metal plate that is then run through a press, typically resulting in a single print. Degas embraced the medium with enormous enthusiasm, inventing a new repertoire of mark-making that included wiping, scraping, scratching, fingerprinting and rendering via removal. The resulting works are characterized by enigmatic and mutable forms, luminous passages emerging from darkness and a heightened tactility. Taking the monotype process to radical ends, Degas explored a variety of subjects, including city dwellers in motion; harshly illuminated cafe singers, ballet dancers on and offstage, women in intimate settings; and evanescent landscapes. With this medium, Degas is at his most modern, liberating drawing from tradition, depicting the body in new and daring ways, and boldly engaging the possibilities of abstraction. Published to accompany an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, this richly illustrated catalogue presents approximately 120 monotypes along with some 60 related works, including paintings, drawings, pastels, sketchbooks and prints. Essays and detailed studies by curators, scholars and conservators explore the creative potency of Degas’ rarely seen monotypes, and highlight their impact on his wider practice.
Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas (1834–1917) was a French painter, draftsman, printmaker and sculptor celebrated for his scenes of modern life, from the cabaret concert to the racetrack to the ballet, the subject for which he is best known. Academically trained, Degas emulated old master and 19th-century predecessors; at the same time, he embraced radically new subjects, compositions and techniques.

Jodi Hauptmann is Senior Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Carol Armstrong is Professor of History of Art at Yale University.

Jonas Beyer is Professor in the Department of Art History at the Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen.

Kathryn Brown is a specialist in modern French painting, literature and contemporary art and lectures at Tilburg University, The Netherlands.

Karl Buchberg is Senior Conservator, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Hollis Clayson is Professor of Art History and Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities at Northwestern University.

Samantha Friedman is Assistant Curator of Department of Drawings and Prints at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Richard Kendall is Curator-at-Large, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, New York.

Laura Neufeld is Assistant Conservator at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Stephanie O’Rourke is former Mellon Fellow at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Raisa Rexer is a freelance art critic and instructor of French at Yeshiva University and City College, CUNY.

Jill DeVonyar is an Art historian.

"Cafe Concert Singer" (c. 1875-76) is reproduced from Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty.

PRAISE AND REVIEWS

Forbes

Adam Lehrer

Degas at his most blissfully experimental.

The Wall Street Journal

In monotype, even his ballet dancers leap into new territory.

The New Yorker

Andrea K. Scott

...reveals the inveterate experimentalist behind the tutus.

The Wall Street Journal

Susan Delson

That sense of expanded possibility pervades Degas’s work in monotype, and carries over into other aspects of his art.

The New York Times

Roberta Smith

“A Strange New Beauty” brings a new logic and coherence to Degas’s experimentation... It makes the past feel alive and useful.

WNYC

Deborah Solomon

Breathtaking... There are visual pleasures here that you will never see anywhere else.

Midwest Book Review

James A. Cox

It was his work in monotype that reveals the true extent of his restless experimentation... With this medium, Degas is at his most modern, liberating drawing from tradition, depicting the body in new and daring ways, and boldly engaging the possibilities of abstraction.

The New York Review of Books

Anka Muhlstein

An exceptionally complex and intriguing exhibition, which makes the best possible use of an array of works seldom seen in one place. Together they constitute a genuine portrait of the artist.

Bookforum

Christopher Lyon

More than 120 illustrations alternate with concise essays, offering an ideal way… to view these precursors of works by today’s most interesting figurative artists.

Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty

STATUS: Out of stock indefinitely.

FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG

CORY REYONLDS | DATE 3/25/2016

Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty

Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty, Heads of a Man and a Woman

In her Introduction to MoMA's supreme new survey of Edgar Degas' surprisingly modern and experimental monotype prints, curator Jodi Hauptman quotes an 1876 letter from the etcher Marcellin Desboutin. "'Degas,' Desboutin wrote in scandalized incredulity, 'is no longer a friend, a man, an artist! He’s a zinc or copper plate blackened with printer’s ink, and plate and man are flattened together by his printing press whose mechanism has swallowed him completely! The man’s crazes are out of this world. He now is in the metallurgic phase of reproducing his drawings with a roller and is running all over Paris, in the heat wave—trying to find the legion of specialists who will realize his obsession. He is a real poem! He talks only of metallurgists, lead casters, lithographers, planishers!'" Featured image is "Heads of a Man and a Woman" (c. 1877-80). continue to blog


FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/27/2016

Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty

Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty

In her Introduction to Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty, MoMA curator Jodi Hauptman writes, "To the writer Arsène Alexandre, writing not long after the artist's death, 'his monotypes represent the area of his work in which he was most free, most alive, and most reckless… not hampered by any rule.' Indeed it is in the monotypes that Degas is at his most modern—capturing the spirit of urban life, depicting the body in new and daring ways, debating the singular and the copy, liberating mark-making from the tradition and boldly engaging the possibilities of abstraction." Featured image is "Forest in the Mountains" (c. 1890). continue to blog


FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/26/2016

Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty

Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty, Getting into Bed

"More than any other body of Degas' work, the brothel monotypes are a conundrum," Raisa Rexer writes in MoMA's enlightening new exhibition catalog. "Unmentioned in Degas' personal writings, for the most part unremarked by contemporaries and unexhibited until after his death, this series of small-format images left few historical traces to illuminate why or for whom they were produced. With their often severe visual style and casual use of graphic nudity, they seem to lack the 'quasi-religious and chaste' quality that, for Pierre-Auguste Renoir, set Degas' prostitutes apart form those of other contemporary artists; indeed Degas' brother René allegedly destroyed another seventy monotypes upon the artist's death because they were too overtly obscene. Yet the monotypes also contain many of Degas' artistic trademarks, opening them to interpretation both as erotic fantasies and as studies in tonal contrast whose controversial content is incidental to their stylistic ingenuity. In the monotypes, subject matter and qualities of execution refuse to align: privilege the other and they look very much like artistic expression." Featured image is "Getting into Bed" c. 1880-85. continue to blog


EDGAR DEGAS MONOGRAPHS + ARTIST'S BOOKS

Degas: Dance, Politics and Society

DEGAS: DANCE, POLITICS AND SOCIETY

DelMonico Books/Museu de Arte de São Paulo

ISBN: 9781636810041
USD $85.00
| CAD $116 UK £ 67

Pub Date: 8/3/2021
Active | In stock