Degas' Method

“No art is less spontaneous than mine…. What I do is the result of reflection and study of the great masters; of inspiration, spontaneity, temperament …I know nothing.” — Edgar Degas (1834–1917).With characteristic dry humour, Degas presented his artistic endeavours as the result of other people’s hard work and artistic originality, setting himself apart from his fellow Impressionists—he largely rejected the term despite being widely considered an integral founder of the movement—by choosing to direct his attention towards pensive, isolated study of the old masters. By claiming to know “nothing”, the artist was making a conspicuously paradoxical statement; by learning through imitation—be it drawing styles, statements, ideologies, and both academic and artistic radicalities—he was not wholly in error when according others credit for his work, but it is far from the whole story.Through his practice and involvement in the Impressionist movement, Degas altered both the political and aesthetic premises for painting. His way of proceeding was idiosyncratic and thoroughly original, not only in the individual works, but in general terms when he consciously reused experiences ranging across his production. Art is no simple matter, but a statement that is developed over and across time. Degas placed himself as the latest in a line of great masters, consciously working and thinking in ways which made him the heir to—and successor to the throne of—the truly great art which endures beyond its own era. He worked stubbornly towards an art, the visual freedom and apparently unregulated appearance of which seem unsurpassed even to this day. He was a master of both tradition and progress—and this is why his oeuvre occupies an enormously important position in the narrative of the painting of our own time.Rather than a desire to bring to light a “complete” account of the artist’s oeuvre, Degas’ Method is an extensive retrospective that stages and presents the synergy that exists between the works. Lavishly illustrated, the publication spans painting, pastel, monotype, sculpture, drawing and several graphic disciplines to bring together the artist’s vast catalogue of work, ranging across motif, technique and chronology—not least the rare collection of bronze-cast figures, originally found in wax and clay in the artist’s atelier after his death.These disciplines and themes are explored in the books in-depth essays and reprints, by writers and scholars as diverse as Line Clausen Pederson (“Degas’ Method”); Peter Parshall (“Degas and the Closeted Image”); Daphne Barbour and Shelley Sturman (“Degas’ Process Captured in Bronze”); Elizabeth Steele (“Dancers Practising in the Foyer and Dancers at the Barre”); Flemming Friborg (“Sapphires in Velvet Jewelery Boxes”); Édouard Kopp (“Degas’ Draughtsmanship”); Josephine Nielsen-Bergqvist (“Degas in the ‘laboratory’”); and Walter Sickert (“The Sculptor of Movement”—the artist’s preface to the catalogue for the 1923 Exhibition of the Works in Sculpture of Edgar Degas).A collaborative publication between Black Dog Publishing and NY Carlsberg Glyptotek—whose 2013 exhibition of the same name the book is a companion piece to— Degas’ Method is an essential new insight in to the work of a titan of both Impression and realist art.