Perspectives on Degas

<p>The first comprehensive assessment of Degas's legacy to be published in over two decades, <em>Perspectives on Degas</em> 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.</p> <p>Contents<br><br>List of illustrations <br>Notes on contributors <br><br>Introduction <br>Kathryn Brown<br><br><strong>Section I Art in context: gender, race, and labour</strong><br><br>1 Revisiting Degas: a meditation on women, horses, and nature <br>Norma Broude<br><br>2 Sport and embodiment: Degas’s racecourse scenes <br>Shao-Chien Tseng<br><br>3 Garçon! Waiters, labour, and performance in Edgar Degas’s The Spectators <br>Mary Hunter<br><br>4 The female spectator of modern art and the spectacle of medicalized femininity <br>Anthea Callen<br><br>5 ‘Miss La La’s’ teeth: further reflections on Degas and ‘race’ <br>Marilyn R. Brown<br><br><strong>Section II Making and materiality</strong><br><br>6 Edgar Degas’s Princess Pauline de Metternich and the phenomenological swirl <br>Marni Reva Kessler<br><br>7 Degas’s sculpture: the inside story <br>Patricia Failing<br><br>8 Pictures in flux: Degas’s monotypes and some notes on their relation to other media <br>Jonas Beyer<br><br>9 Intimacy and exclusion: Degas’s illustrations for Ludovic Halévy’s La Famille Cardinal <br>Kathryn Brown<br><br><strong>Section III ‘Writing’ Degas</strong><br><br>10 The collecting practices of Degas and Cassatt: gender and the construction of value in art history <br>Ruth E. Iskin<br><br>11 Degas and subjectivity: from psychoanalysis to the extended mind <br>Heather Dawkins<br><br>12 In his own words: Walter Sickert’s writings on Degas <br>Anna Gruetzner Robbins<br><br>Bibliography <br>Index</p>