Perspectives on Degas

The first comprehensive assessment of Degas's legacy to be published in over two decades, Perspectives on Degas unites a team of international scholars to analyze Degas's work, artistic practice, and unique methods of pictorial problem-solving. Established scholars and curators show how recent trends in art historical thinking can stimulate innovative interpretations of Degas's paintings, prints, sculptures, and drawings and reveal new ideas about his place in the art historical narrative of the nineteenth-century avant-garde. Questions posed by contributors include: what interpretive approaches are open to a new generation of art historians in the wake of a vast body of existing scholarship on nineteenth-century art? In what ways can feminist analyses of Degas's works continue to yield new results? Which of Degas's works have received less attention in critical literature to date and what does study of them reveal? As the centenary of Degas's death approaches, this book offers a timely re-evaluation of the critical literature that has developed in response to Degas's work and identifies ways in which the further study of this artist's multi-facetted output can deepen our understanding of the wider scientific, literary, and artistic ideas that circulated in France during the latter decades of the nineteenth century.

ContentsList of illustrations Notes on contributors Introduction Kathryn BrownSection I Art in context: gender, race, and labour 1 Revisiting Degas: a meditation on women, horses, and nature Norma Broude2 Sport and embodiment: Degas’s racecourse scenes Shao-Chien Tseng3 Garçon! Waiters, labour, and performance in Edgar Degas’s The Spectators Mary Hunter4 The female spectator of modern art and the spectacle of medicalized femininity Anthea Callen5 ‘Miss La La’s’ teeth: further reflections on Degas and ‘race’ Marilyn R. BrownSection II Making and materiality 6 Edgar Degas’s Princess Pauline de Metternich and the phenomenological swirl Marni Reva Kessler7 Degas’s sculpture: the inside story Patricia Failing8 Pictures in flux: Degas’s monotypes and some notes on their relation to other media Jonas Beyer9 Intimacy and exclusion: Degas’s illustrations for Ludovic Halévy’s La Famille Cardinal Kathryn BrownSection III ‘Writing’ Degas 10 The collecting practices of Degas and Cassatt: gender and the construction of value in art history Ruth E. Iskin11 Degas and subjectivity: from psychoanalysis to the extended mind Heather Dawkins12 In his own words: Walter Sickert’s writings on Degas Anna Gruetzner RobbinsBibliography Index

Kathryn Brown is a lecturer in modern and contemporary art at Loughborough University in the United Kingdom. She is the author of Women Readers in French Painting 1870–1890 (Ashgate, 2012).