Degas’s substantial corpus of landscape pictures has long been relegated to the margins of his production, with scholars’ attention having been almost entirely focused on his celebrated pictures of dancers, bathers, and other representations of the human figure. This lecture will demonstrate the critical significance of attending to his landscape pictures for understanding his larger body of work. It will position Degas’s landscapes as the purest distillations of fundamental but long-overlooked features of his practice, one of the most significant being his tendency to select motifs that point back to the conditions of his pictures’ making. His landscapes also reflect Degas’s rethinking of representation in material terms and his consideration of the matter of art in light of its capacity to convey the material make-up of his subjects. Finally and very importantly, they illuminate the central role that the picturing of ground and the phenomena of weight and gravity played in his work. Far from being incidental aspects of his corpus, then, Degas’s landscapes help place his entire body of work and the set of concerns and interests that guided his making in an entirely new light.
Michelle Foa is associate professor of nineteenth-century European art in the Art Department of Tulane University. Her first book, Georges Seurat: The Art of Vision, was published in 2015 by Yale University Press. Her second book, Edgar Degas and the Matter of Art, is under contract with Yale, and an article drawn from that material published in The Art Bulletin was awarded the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Article Prize in 2022. Other articles on the artist have appeared or are forthcoming in Art History and West 86th. Last year, she co-curated the exhibition Edgar Degas: Multi-Media Artist in the Age of Impressionism at the Clark Art Institute. She is currently co-editing with Carol Armstrong a special issue of West 86th titled “Earthbound: Gravity/Figure/Ground” that will include the work of 20 authors and be published next year. Her work has been supported by numerous fellowships and grants, including from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, where she was a Samuel H. Kress Senior Fellow, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, where she was a Francis Gould Foundation Fellow, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institut national d’histoire de l’art, where she was a visiting scholar.
Organised by Dr Sarah Grandin, Lecturer in the Arts of Early Modern France, The Courtauld.
