Looking at Degas From the Ground Up

The pivotal role that the representation of weight, gravity, ground, and equilibrium played in the work of French Impressionist Edgar Degas was the subject of the Jan 22 lecture, “The Ground of Degas’s Pictures” by Michelle A. Foa, associate professor of art history in the Newcomb Art Department of Tulane University.

The Loria Center event was part of Yale’s History of Art Department lecture series.

Using Degas’s ballet, equestrian, and landscape pictures as examples, Foa’s talk reframed the artist’s body of work as not just expressions of the artist’s attraction to the fashionable spectacles of his day, but “as meditations on the relationship of bodies to the terrain beneath them.”

Foa told the audience that during the artist’s lifetime, certain colleagues and critics identified Degas’s propensity for technical and material experimentation, in which he regularly “used an especially wide range of media and techniques, manipulated his materials in unusual ways, and combined multiple media in a single work as a central component of his practice.”

Foa then described the numerous ways that Degas’s motifs and media are inextricably intertwined. “He consistently worked to devise new means of representing the specific materiality of the worlds in his pictures via his unconventional media and processes.”

Foa said: “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.”

Foa pointed out that Degas’s sustained engagement with new media and tools was not shared by most of the other Impressionists, “a key reason that these foundational features of his practice have been sidelined in many accounts of his work.”

More than a century after the artist’s death (he lived from 1834–1917), “there is still a great deal left to understand about the significance and conceptual sophistication of his investment in artistic process,” said Foa.

Foa co-curated a 2024 exhibition at the Clark Art Institute titled “Edgar Degas: Multi-Media Artist in the Age of Impressionism,” which was among the only shows ever organized around Degas’s commitment to innovative modes of making. 

Foa’s current book project, “Edgar Degas and the Matter of Art,” which is under advance contract with Yale University Press, will be the only book-length study to situate the artist’s engagement with the matter of his depicted scenes and of his work as crucial to the meaning of his corpus, thereby “illuminating the conceptual complexity of his attitude towards materials and making,” she said.

“Degas’s corpus thus enriches our sense of how late 19th-and early 20th-century artists’ investment in questions of materiality might manifest in their work, practices, and interests,” said Foa.

Foa quoted a telling passage from a letter Degas wrote to a friend: “I will descend the slope very quickly and roll down I don’t know where, wrapped in many bad pastel drawings.” Foa said this particular metaphor “is entirely in keeping with the critical importance that the representation of heft, ground, and our earthbound status played in his work.”

Foa’s book goes beyond Degas to critically examine how the history of late 19^th-century French art has been interpreted and written about in the 20th century, and aims “to identify and remedy some of the blind spots in the existing scholarship, uncovering that which has been overlooked, excluded from, or undervalued in the study of the art of this period.”

Foa is also a 2026-2027 Mid-Career Fellow at the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.