History of Art Lecture Series: Michelle Foa, Tulane University

Prof. Michelle Foa (Tulane University) gives a talk title, “The Ground of Degas’s Pictures.”

Abstract:

“Where has the time gone when I thought I was strong, when I was full of logic, full of projects? I will descend the slope very quickly and roll down I don’t know where, wrapped in many bad pastel drawings.” So wrote Edgar Degas in a letter to a close friend in 1884, the image of him tumbling down a hill intended to convey his sense of professional and personal despair. That Degas chose this particular metaphor is entirely in keeping with the pivotal role that the representation of weight, gravity, ground, and equilibrium played in his practice. While his ballet and equestrian pictures have long been understood as expressions of his attraction to the fashionable spectacles of his day, this talk will reframe his rendering of these motifs, among others, in part as meditations on the relationship of bodies to the terrain beneath them.

During Edgar Degas’s lifetime, certain friends, colleagues, and critics perceptively identified his propensity for technical and material experimentation—using an especially wide range of media and techniques, manipulating his materials in unusual ways, and combining multiple media in a single work—as a central component of his practice. Nevertheless, more than a century after the artist’s death, there is still a great deal left to understand about the significance and conceptual sophistication of his investment in artistic process. Positioning Degas’s experimentations in the context of his equally important but long-overlooked investigation in his work into the physical and material qualities of the world around him reveals remarkable intersections between some of his best-known subjects and the materials, processes, and bodily gestures involved in the production of his pictures.

What emerges is an understanding of Degas’s interest in testing the representational possibilities of his materials and techniques, in devising strategies for evoking the phenomena of weight and gravity in his pictures, and in identifying motifs that point to the conditions of his pictures’ making. A persistent impulse to rethink representation in material terms, in which he viewed the matter of art in light of its capacity to convey the heft and substance of the world, and his sustained focus on the relationship of bodies to the earth beneath them drove both how Degas made his pictures and his attachment to some of his most celebrated subjects.