Description

Author: Jane Munro. 272 pages with 150 colour illustrations. Edgar Degas’s relentless experimentation with technical procedures is a hallmark of his lifelong desire to learn. The numerous iterations of compositions and poses suggest an intense self-discipline, as well as a refusal to accept any creative solution as definitive or finite. Published in the centenary year of the artist’s death, and drawing substantially on the collections of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, this book presents an exceptional array of Degas’s work, including paintings, drawings, pastels, etchings, monotypes, counterproofs and sculpture, with key works from private and public collections in Europe and the United States, some of them published here for the first time. Viewed together, these impressive works represent a lifetime of innovation and artistic production. Essays by leading Degas Scholars, specialists in sculpture, printmaking and conservation, explore his practice and themes of the human figure and landscape. The book opens with a study of Degas’s debt to the Old Masters, and it concludes with a consideration of his artistic legacy and his influence on leading artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.