CORY REYONLDS | DATE 3/25/2016

Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty

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).