MHC Seminar Lecture
Michelle Foa
Abstract:
During Edgar Degas’s lifetime, certain friends, colleagues, and critics perceptively identified hispropensity 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. This lecture will situate Degas’sexperimentation 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, including his particular engagement with the matter of filth. Close examination of his corpus reveals remarkableintersections between some of his best-known subjects and the materials, processes, and bodily gestures involved in the production of his pictures. What emerges is a new understanding of Degas’s interest in testing the possibilities and limits of representation, 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 and to view the matter of art in light of its capacity to convey the heft and substance of the world drove both how Degas made his pictures and his attachment to some of his most celebrated subjects.
Bio:
Michelle Foa is Associate Professor of nineteenth-century European art in the Newcomb Art Department of Tulane University. Her first book, Georges Seurat: The Art of Vision, was published in 2015 by Yale University Press. She is finishing her second book, titled The Matter of Degas, which analyzes the conceptual significance of the artist’s sustained experimentation with diverse media and techniques and his complex strategies for representing the materiality and heft of the world in pictorial form. Part of this research published in The Art Bulletin was awarded the 2021 Article Prize by the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association. Another major research project explores the network of global developments that reshaped the making and consumption of paper over the course of the nineteenth century and the impact of these developments on artistic and cultural production. She has received numerous grants and fellowships, including from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, where she was a Samuel H. Kress Senior Fellow, and the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, where she will be the Florence Gould Foundation Fellow in the spring of 2024. She is also curating an exhibition on Degas’s innovative methods of making that will open at the Clark in the summer of 2024.
LOCATION:Barker Center, Room 133 STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20231018T210000Z DTEND:20231018T210000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR