Diss.--Philosophische Fakultät--Saarbrücken--Universität des Saarlandes, 1996. / Bibliogr. p. 219-233. Index.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1971. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

1 / Maclyn Le Bourgeois Hickey

Within the context of the revolution of subject matter in painting and sculpture that occurred during the nineteenth century, especially in the work of French painters, the imagery of the nude has been explored of late mostly with a view to illustrating the underlying sexism of these images and the degrading treatment of women as objects in these works. In this discussion, the work of Edgar Degas, an artist whose subject matter in his mature work is dominated by the nude, has been treated very little. Yet with Degas, the development of this imagery is particularly clearly demarcated throughout his career. The nudes of his early period, the history painting nudes, are very different than those of his mature work, those executed after c.1885. As well, the fact that Degas abandoned the subject for a period of almost twelve years would tend to indicate an abrupt change in his conception of the imagery from his early to his mature paintings. With the publication by Theodore Reff of Degas's notebooks, it is now possible to trace his development of the subject with firmer dates than was possible heretofore. As his first explorations of the subject in oil and pastel occur in 1879, it is then obvious that Degas's monotypes of bathers and brothels, executed c.1876-78, are his first real treatment of the nude of modern life, a discovery that makes the monotypes all important to this discussion. Further, it can be readily demonstrated upon close examination of these prints in relation to size, handling, motifs and poses that Degas did not consider the bathers and the prostitutes as two separate subjects and that the distinction is one imposed by later cataloguers of the monotypes. Degas's interest in the subject of prostitution is by no means an isolated case in the later nineteenth century in France. Other writers and artists chose it as one which conformed to the prevailing theories of naturalism as a truly modern theme. Nor did Degas ignore a long tradition of nineteenth century lithographs with naughty subjects in his depiction of the nudes. The interest in prostitution in this context and Degas's awareness of the lithographic tradition shed some light on the reaction of the press and audiences towards Degas's mature nudes that he exhibited in 1886. His public found the pastels and oils offensive, probably because the images did resemble the prints of the lithographers of the Romantic era and the paintings of similar subjects by other artists in the seventies and eighties whose subjects could be clearly identified with the subject of prostitution and were rejected by the official body, the annual Salon. Degas's later, mature nudes were regarded as slightly salacious subjects for many years and their initial reception by the public in the eighteen-eighties forms yet another chapter in the study of the changes in subject matter that were hotly debated in artistic circles during the nineteenth century and beyond. / Arts, Faculty of / Art History, Visual Art and Theory, Department of / Graduate

No description available.

From the courtesan Esther in Honoré de Balzac’s Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (1838-1847) to the femme sterile in Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) to Edgar Degas’s nudes, women’s objectified bodies dominated artistic attention in nineteenth-century France. Appearance defined their roles, and tropes often replaced women in narratives centered on male desire. However, the women in these works resist erasure and challenge feminine passivity and marginalization. This dissertation explores their ambiguous female identities and their strategies of resistance. The tension in Balzac’s, Baudelaire’s, and Degas’s works between objectifying women and their textual importance emerges through the relationships among subject, object, and the abject self (as defined by Judith Butler) and among the narrator, the work, and sometimes the reader or viewer. The male gaze limits women’s identities within the subject-object-abject framework. In turn, these women exercise soft power to alter their status and identities. Joseph Nye defines soft power as attracting others and co-opting their power to achieve one’s goals. Through gender theory, I redefine these women, not only as objects of desire, but also as narrative subjects. In Balzac’s novel, Esther negotiates social dynamics to define her identity. She progresses from passive object to untenable abject self to literary subject. By using her body, creating documents, and crafting ritualized social encounters, Esther claims ownership of herself. In Les Fleurs du mal, Baudelaire often portrays women as a pretext for poetics. Yet, “La Chevelure,” “La Beauté,” “L’Homme et la mer,” and “Le Serpent qui danse,” display signs of feminine power. Baudelaire stages interactions between the poet-narrator and the sexualized woman and counteracts the subject-object binary through the gaze. Both the poet-narrator and representations of the feminine are necessary to advance the text. Degas’s nudes hinge upon voyeurism, objectification, and self-representation. Degas’s women are ambiguous, as shown in selected brothel monotypes, bather pastels, lithographs, and sculptures. Through Caroline Armstrong’s and Kathryn Brown’s readings of the monotypes, I demonstrate how these works challenge the male gaze and grant the female nude at least partial status as narrative subject. Tracing these works across media elucidates a female interiority that resists objectification.

My study of Edgar Degas provides an arena for the examination of how artistic production can elucidate the complexities of cultural diversity, particularly through the evolution of artistic identity through overlapping cultural influences. Previous scholarship on Degas has been mainly Francophile in orientation, while my work focuses on the parameters of artistic reciprocity between Degas and nineteenth-century Italian art, artists and critics. Degas spent the majority of his formative years (July 1856-April 1860) traveling and studying in Italy, with extended periods in Rome, Naples and Florence. He actively sketched after the Italian Renaissance masters, participated in life drawing sessions at the Villa Medici, and partook in artistic exchange through friendships established in the social atmosphere of cafés. Familial bonds, through blood and marriage, to Naples and Florence provided Degas with additional ties to the peninsula. His camaraderie with Italian artists and critics did not end upon his return to Paris. Rather, these Italian artists became a vital part of Degas' social circle, with whom he travelled, dined, and participated in a variety of artistic exchanges. These exchanges fundamentally impacted Degas' oeuvre, as well as those of the Italians. Exploring Degas' connections with the art community of Italy allows a reevaluation of the traditional understanding of Degas as a French artist. It focuses attention on the impact that Italian aesthetics had on the formation of Degas' style which has been historically understood as tied to Parisian modernism. Degas provides a unique opportunity to study the impact of multicultural influences arising from his attention to the artistic methodology of the French Academy, his Italian lineage and his role as a French tourist and artist in Italy. Finding the structure of the École too constrictive and instead preferring to forge a parallel route to Academicism, Degas traveled to the peninsula outside of the sphere of the French Academy. He relied on a shared language, culture and familial connections to remain abroad longer and travel more extensively than many of his contemporaries. As a result Degas is much more rooted in the Italian culture than any of his French contemporaries. The many dimensions and experiences of Degas' Italian sojourn affected the burgeoning career of an artist who intended to join the ranks of the history painters, and instead found himself a critical observer of contemporary life. What I elucidate in this dissertation is how deeply rooted Degas is in the language, cultures and history of Italy. These unbreakable ties, the many aspects of the Italian cultures in which he feels at home are absorbed and brought back to Paris and into his oeuvre. This study seeks to demonstrate that Degas was neither wholly French nor Italian (or for that matter, American), rather his multiple dimensions make for an international, truly cosmopolitan artist in the second half of the nineteenth century. Furthermore, I engage and explore the social and artistic relationships of a group of artists who were acutely aware of the pressures of nationalism and the boundaries of nations, but while conceding to these realities, did not want to be limited by such demarcations. This reading of the evidence allows for a more meaningful investigation of the modalities of the formation of artistic identity and dialogue in the nineteenth century.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Alabama at Birmingham, 2009. / Title from PDF title page (viewed Jan. 25, 2010). Includes bibliographical references (p. 125-129).

This thesis explores the relationship between photography and painting from the mid-nineteenth-century to the early twentieth-century. Specifically, I focus on the artistic outputs of four painters, Degas, Vuillard, Bonnard and Sickert, and the different manners in which they incorporated photography within their creative practices. In particular, I concentrate on photography’s representation of and relationship with time, discussing this in relation to three concepts, that of the narrative moment, memory and motion; concepts that painters often experimented with and explored during the timeframe mentioned. Throughout the thesis I examine how the paintings of my selected artists compare and contrast with photographic imagery. By doing so I demonstrate how these artists incorporated and commented on photographic notions of time within their paintings. Three of the artists, Degas, Vuillard and Bonnard, also experimented with photography and I look at how their photographic experiments related to and/or impacted their painting practices. This thesis argues that the selected painters’ experimentation with photography did not hinder their creative vision, but rather enhanced it. Further, I comment on how these artists recognised the differences between photographic representations of life and their own visual and emotional experiences, thereby challenging photography’s connection with objective truth; an important critique considering that photography was still in its infancy.

Focusing on the prints of Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt and Camille Pissarro, my dissertation explores the development of the belle épreuve, or the fine print, in relation to the Impressionist movement. I firstly consider the commercial tactics of the Impressionists in the face of the evolution of the modern art market and the decreasing relevancy of the Salon and expound on previous scholarship by demonstrating how the Impressionists' modes of presentation proved especially conducive to showcasing works on paper and how we might apply observations about the speculative nature of the Impressionists' formal innovations to their prints. Additionally I highlight contemporaneous observations about the heterogeneity of the Impressionist exhibitions that reveal meaningful insights into the nineteenth-century perception of the artists' relationships to each other, thus questioning the tendency to divide the exhibitors into two groups, the Degas-led realists and the Monet-led colorists. Then I consider the printmaking practices of Degas, Cassatt and Pissarro individually, elucidating how each artist's attitudes toward work, craft and business manifest formally in a small selection of examples from their printed oeuvres intended for exhibition or publication. Among the core members of the Impressionist group, Degas, Cassatt and Pissarro represented those most enamored with printmaking, even collaborating to create prints for a never-realized journal during the winter and spring of 1879 and 1880. I posit that the artists' shared compulsions for regular work, fascination with artistic processes, technical flexibility and curiosity and forward-thinking disregard for the traditional hierarchy accorded to media rendered them particularly suited for making rarified, laborious prints. A final factor that connects Degas, Cassatt and Pissarro is that all three artists had complicated relationships with the business of art or the need to sell. The dichotomy of art making versus art marketing manifested itself in their prints. While printmaking as a process implies multiple pulls of an original image for commercial reasons, by emphasizing handicraft through idiosyncratic techniques, Degas, Cassatt and Pissarro accentuated the artistry and labor of their prints. Because of the complicatedness of their practices, printmaking did not turn out to be particularly lucrative for any of them, yet the artists' efforts correlate to a concurrent vogue for intimate exhibitions and works, in terms of both size and technique, and Degas, Cassatt and Pissarro seemingly undertook printmaking with the progressive clientele already established for Impressionism in mind. I thusly connect my discussions of biography and personality to a consideration of Impressionism's relationship to the changing art market of the late nineteenth century, in which facture, as a record of artistic temperament, became a sought-after commodity for collectors of avant-garde art. Despite superficial differences with regard to their subject matter and approaches, an examination of Degas, Cassatt and Pissarro's printmaking practices reveals the assumed draftsmen and the colorists of the New Painting as kindred spirits, for whom the how of art-making proved just as significant as the what and for whom marketing was important but making was vital. The artists' uses of combinations of etching, softground, drypoint and aquatint demonstrates concerns for both design and tone, and each artist accordingly strove to achieve in their prints a balance of personal sensations and decorative artifice.  / Art History