Explores the ways in which the human body, especially the female body, was visualized by artists in the late-19th century. The book focuses on the work of Degas and deals with issues of gender, sexuality and visual representation to illuminate the Impressionist's depictions of women.

"In Degas' work there are a number of fundamental elements which exist across oeuvre and motif, technique and chronology. It is with these elements that Degas' Method is concerned: that which catches one's attention if the customary pigeonholing of the works is abandoned and the works themselves are returned to the creative ferment from which they emerged, where they exist side by side -- and from whence Degas, in a manner entirely his own, has taken and combined them. Degas' Method mixes painting, pastel, monotype, sculpture, drawing and several graphic disciplines in the desire to bring together the artist's production, ranging across motif, technique and chronology." -- Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek website.

Paint Like a Master--Paint Like Degas! Edgar Degas is one of the most enduringly popular artists of his time, and his unique style and experimental approach to painting, using oils, pastels and mixed media, make him an artist that any painter can learn from today. In Paint Like Degas, professional artist Damian Callan, combines insights into Degas' methods with practical exercises to offer an exciting new way to develop your painting skills--whatever your level. You will learn the secrets of the master's creativity, enriching your understanding of Degas' work and showing how you can apply his techniques to give your own art even more depth and life. Paint Like Degas includes: Techniques for using pastels, oil paints and mixed media to create works of art with depth and atmosphere Exercises on subjects ranging from developing composition to layering colors to making monotypes Masterclass demonstrations showing step-by-step how to combine techniques to create finished works of art

Dialogues with Degas demonstrates the ongoing relevance of Edgar Degas to 20th- and 21st-century ideas and art practices. The first in-depth examination of this major artist's impact on contemporary art, this book explores how contemporary practitioners have used Degas's creativity as a springboard to engage imaginatively and critically with themes of colonialism, gender, race and class. Individual chapters are devoted to dialogues between Degas's art and works produced by Frank Auerbach, Cecily Brown, Xinyi Cheng, Ryan Gander, Maggi Hambling, Damien Hirst, Howard Hodgkin, Chantal Joffe, Leon Kossoff, R.B. Kitaj, Juan Muñoz, Paula Rego, Jenny Saville, Yinka Shonibare, Cy Twombly and Rebecca Warren. Through close analyses of selected paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures, Kathryn Brown explores how Degas's technical and compositional experiments have been extended or challenged in innovative ways. By experimenting with the materials and methods of existing works, contemporary artists generate visual palimpsests that make new demands of the viewer and prompt a reconsideration of ideas that have informed histories of 19th-century French art. The book overturns familiar conceptions of influence by eschewing a genealogical approach and prioritizing, instead, the analysis of non-linear encounters between artworks. This encourages a new conception of the agency of visual artefacts and of the conversations they are capable of entertaining with each other. While this study sheds new light on Degas's art and that of his interlocutors, it also has methodological significance for the writing of art history.

"More than any other artist in the Impressionist group, Degas was fascinated by ideas and consciously based his work on them. "What I do is the result of reflection and study of the great masters," he once confessed, "of inspiration, spontaneity, temperament I know nothing." Yet his work has been understood very inadequately from that point of view. Publications on him, once dominated by memoirs inspired by his remarkable personality, are now concerned with cataloguing and studying limited aspects of his complex art. Its intellectual power and originality, which were evident to contemporary writers like Duranty and Valery, have not been studied sufficiently by more recent critics. It is this side of Degas's art--as seen in his ingenious pictorial strategies and technical innovations, his use of motifs like the window, the mirror, and the picture within the picture, his invention of striking, psychologically compelling compositions, and his creation of a sculptural idiom at once formal and vernacular--that is the subject of these essays. Inevitably, given the range of his intellectual interests, the essays are also concerned with his contacts with leading novelists and poets of his time and his efforts to illustrate or draw inspiration from their works. Throughout, the author makes use of an important, largely unpublished source, the material in Degas's notebooks, on which he has recently published a complete catalogue"--Publisher's description.

Carefully reproduced from a rare 1923 limited edition, most of these magnificent drawings are unavailable elsewhere in published form. Dancers, nudes, portraits, travel scenes, and more. 100 drawings, including 8 in full color.