Degas

Degas
Author: Adriano Pedrosa
Publisher:
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2021
Genre: Art and society
ISBN: 9786557770054

This substantial new monograph on the work of Edgar Degas (1834-1917), one of the most significant artists of the 19th and 20th centuries, is a decisive contribution to the literature on the French Impressionist artist. An innovative and groundbreaking book, with underlying discussions related to "dance, politics and society," it pays special attention to issues of gender, identity, labor, race and the representation of women. Degas worked in various mediums, and, at the end of his life, left around 6,000 works, including 2,000 related to the world of dance and ballet. The contradictions and ambiguities of his art, especially the way he straddles both tradition and modernity, reaffirm both his uniqueness and significance in the history of Western art. Degas: Dance, Politics and Society includes ten essays, never before published, by experts around the world, and also features a visual essay of black-and-white photographs of the bronze sculptures, including Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, by the Brazilian artist Sofia Borges. Through her camera, Borges reinterprets and conceives new images of Degas' most cherished and classic sculptures. Borges' extraordinary photographs reveal, transform and revisit Degas' works in an innovative and radical manner. Exhibition: Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, São Paulo, Brazil (12.04.2020-08.01.2021).

Degas: Dance, Politics and Society

Degas: Dance, Politics and Society
Author: Adriano Pedrosa
Publisher: Delmonico Books
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2021-07
Genre:
ISBN: 9781636810041

A radical reconception of Degas' sculpture through the lens of gender, labor and more, with new photography of the works This substantial new monograph on the work of Edgar Degas (1834-1917), one of the most significant artists of the 19th and 20th centuries, is a decisive contribution to the literature on the French Impressionist artist. An innovative and groundbreaking book, with underlying discussions related to "dance, politics and society," it pays special attention to issues of gender, identity, labor, race and the representation of women. Degas worked in various mediums, and, at the end of his life, left around 6,000 works, including 2,000 related to the world of dance and ballet. The contradictions and ambiguities of his art, especially the way he straddles both tradition and modernity, reaffirm both his uniqueness and significance in the history of Western art. Degas: Dance, Politics and Society includes ten essays, never before published, by experts around the world, and also features a visual essay of black-and-white photographs of the bronze sculptures, including Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, by the Brazilian artist Sofia Borges. Through her camera, Borges reinterprets and conceives new images of Degas' most cherished and classic sculptures. Borges' extraordinary photographs reveal, transform and revisit Degas' works in an innovative and radical manner.

Dancing for Degas

Dancing for Degas
Author: Kathryn Wagner
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2010-03-16
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0385343868

In the City of Lights, at the dawn of a new age, begins an unforgettable story of great love, great art—and the most painful choices of the heart. With this fresh and vibrantly imagined portrait of the Impressionist artist Edgar Degas, readers are transported through the eyes of a young Parisian ballerina to an era of light and movement. An ambitious and enterprising farm girl, Alexandrie joins the prestigious Paris Opera ballet with hopes of securing not only her place in society but her family’s financial future. Her plan is soon derailed, however, when she falls in love with the enigmatic artist whose paintings of the offstage lives of the ballerinas scandalized society and revolutionized the art world. As Alexandrie is drawn deeper into Degas’s art and Paris’s secrets, will she risk everything for her dreams of love and of becoming the ballet’s star dancer?

The Painted Girls

The Painted Girls
Author: Cathy Marie Buchanan
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2013-01-10
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1101603798

A heartrending, gripping novel about two sisters in Belle Époque Paris and the young woman forever immortalized as muse for Edgar Degas’ Little Dancer Aged Fourteen. 1878 Paris. Following their father’s sudden death, the van Goethem sisters find their lives upended. Without his wages, and with the small amount their laundress mother earns disappearing into the absinthe bottle, eviction from their lodgings seems imminent. With few options for work, Marie is dispatched to the Paris Opéra, where for a scant seventeen francs a week, she will be trained to enter the famous ballet. Her older sister, Antoinette, finds work as an extra in a stage adaptation of Émile Zola’s naturalist masterpiece L’Assommoir. Marie throws herself into dance and is soon modeling in the studio of Edgar Degas, where her image will forever be immortalized as Little Dancer Aged Fourteen. There she meets a wealthy male patron of the ballet, but might the assistance he offers come with strings attached? Meanwhile Antoinette, derailed by her love for the dangerous Émile Abadie, must choose between honest labor and the more profitable avenues open to a young woman of the Parisian demimonde. Set at a moment of profound artistic, cultural, and societal change, The Painted Girls is a tale of two remarkable sisters rendered uniquely vulnerable to the darker impulses of “civilized society.” In the end, each will come to realize that her salvation, if not survival, lies with the other.

Little Dancer Aged Fourteen

Little Dancer Aged Fourteen
Author: Camille Laurens
Publisher: Other Press, LLC
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2018-11-20
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1590519590

This absorbing, heartfelt work uncovers the story of the real dancer behind Degas’s now-iconic sculpture, shedding light on the struggles of late nineteenth-century Parisian life. She is famous throughout the world, but how many know her name? You can admire her figure in Washington, Paris, London, New York, Dresden, or Copenhagen, but where is her grave? We know only her age, fourteen, and the work that she did—because it was already grueling work, at an age when children today are sent to school. In the 1880s, she danced as a “little rat” at the Paris Opera, and what is often a dream for young girls now wasn’t a dream for her. She was fired after several years of intense labor; the director had had enough of her repeated absences. She had been working another job, even two, because the few pennies the Opera paid weren’t enough to keep her and her family fed. She was a model, posing for painters or sculptors—among them Edgar Degas. Drawing on a wealth of historical material as well as her own love of ballet and personal experiences of loss, Camille Laurens presents a compelling, compassionate portrait of Marie van Goethem and the world she inhabited that shows the importance of those who have traditionally been overlooked in the study of art.

Renoir's Dancer

Renoir's Dancer
Author: Catherine Hewitt
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Total Pages: 482
Release: 2018-02-27
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1250157641

Catherine Hewitt's richly told biography of Suzanne Valadon, the illegitimate daughter of a provincial linen maid who became famous as a model for the Impressionists and later as a painter in her own right. In the 1880s, Suzanne Valadon was considered the Impressionists’ most beautiful model. But behind her captivating façade lay a closely-guarded secret. Suzanne was born into poverty in rural France, before her mother fled the provinces, taking her to Montmartre. There, as a teenager Suzanne began posing for—and having affairs with—some of the age’s most renowned painters. Then Renoir caught her indulging in a passion she had been trying to conceal: the model was herself a talented artist. Some found her vibrant still lifes and frank portraits as shocking as her bohemian lifestyle. At eighteen, she gave birth to an illegitimate child, future painter Maurice Utrillo. But her friends Toulouse-Lautrec and Degas could see her skill. Rebellious and opinionated, she refused to be confined by tradition or gender, and in 1894, her work was accepted to the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, an extraordinary achievement for a working-class woman with no formal art training. Renoir’s Dancer tells the remarkable tale of an ambitious, headstrong woman fighting to find a professional voice in a male-dominated world.

Contagion, Hygiene, and the European Avant-Garde

Contagion, Hygiene, and the European Avant-Garde
Author: David Hopkins
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2023-07-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 100090508X

This interdisciplinary collection of essays brings together scholars in the fields of art history, theatre, visual culture, and literature to explore intersections between the European avant-garde (c. 1880–1945) and themes of health and hygiene, such as illness, contagion, cleanliness, and contamination. Examining the artistic oeuvres of some of the canonical names of modern art – including Edgar Degas, Edvard Munch, Pablo Picasso, George Orwell, Marcel Duchamp, and Antonin Artaud – this book investigates instances where the heightened political, social, and cultural currencies embedded within issues of hygiene and contagion have been mobilised, and subversively exploited, to fuel the critical strategy at play. This edited volume promotes an interdisciplinary and socio-historically contextualised understanding of the criticality of the avant-garde gesture and cultivates scholarship that moves beyond the limits of traditional academic subjects to produce innovative and thought-provoking connections and interrelations across various fields. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, literature, theatre, cultural studies, modern history, medical humanities, and visual culture.

Mapping Degas

Mapping Degas
Author: Roberta Crisci-Richardson
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 390
Release: 2015-06-18
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1443879339

The New Art History and the Impressionist canon seem to have successfully claimed Edgar Degas as a misogynist, rabid nationalist and misanthrope whose art was both masterly and experimental. By analysing Degas’s approach to space and his self-fashioning attitude towards identity within the ambiguities of the political and artistic culture of nineteenth-century France, this book questions the characterisation of Degas as a right-wing Frenchman and artist, and will change the way in which Degas is thought about today.

Edgar Degas

Edgar Degas
Author: Richard Thomson
Publisher: Getty Publications
Total Pages: 112
Release: 1995
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0892362855

Edgar Degas was one of the great pioneers of modern art, and the J. Paul Getty and Norton Simon museums are fortunate to own jointly one of his finest pastels, Waiting (L'Attente), which he made sometime between 1880 and 1882, about midway in his career. In this fascinating monograph, author Richard Thomson explores this brilliant work in detail, revealing both the intricacies of its composition and the source of the emotional pull it immediately exerts upon the viewer. For Waiting is, indeed, an extraordinary object both in its craftsmanship and color and, perhaps most especially, in its aura of ambiguity and even mystery.

Degas at the Opera

Degas at the Opera
Author: Henri Loyrette
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020-05-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0500023395

A lavish new investigation into the Paris Opera’s influence on Edgar Degas's painting. From his debut in the 1860s up to his final works after 1900, the Paris Opera formed a focal point of Edgar Degas's paintings. He explored the theater's various spaces—auditorium and stage, private boxes, foyers, and dance studios—and painted those who frequented them: dancers, singers, orchestral musicians, audience members, and subscribers watching from the wings. This theater presented a microcosm of infinite possibilities, allowing him to experiment with multiple points of view, contrasting lighting, motion, and the precision of movement. This catalog, created in concert with an exhibition at the Muse´e d'Orsay in Paris, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, considers the Paris Opera’s influence on Degas as a whole, examining not only his passionate relationship with the house and his musical tastes, but also the infinite resources of the opera's marvelous toolbox. Filled with striking reproductions of Degas’s work and including insightful essays by leading curators and scholars, Degas at the Opera offers admission into the world of Degas and the Paris Opera of the nineteenth century.