June 25, 2024
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CLARK ART INSTITUTE PRESENTS EXHIBITION
ON EDGAR DEGAS AND HIS EXPERIMENTATION
WITH VARIOUS MEDIUMS
Edgar Degas: Multi-Media Artist in the Age of Impressionism opens July 13
(Williamstown, Massachusetts)—Timed to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the First Impressionist Exhibition, held in Paris in 1874, the Clark Art Institute presents Edgar Degas: Multi-Media Artist in the Age of Impressionism. The exhibition highlights the innovative and experimental practices of Edgar Degas in the realm of works on paper. In his pastels, drawings, photographs, and prints, Degas was relentless in exploring unusual media and processes. A range of works from the Clark’s permanent collection and other select loans from public and private collections offer a “behind-the-scenes” look at Degas’s innovative methods, materials, and supports. The exhibition is on view in the Eugene V. Thaw Gallery for Works on Paper in the Clark’s Manton Research Center from July 13 through October 6, 2024.
"The Clark is very fortunate to have deep holdings of works by Edgar Degas in our collection and it provides us with an exceptional opportunity to look at the artist anew by studying the many mediums in which he worked and by exploring his strong interest in testing new techniques and methods in artmaking. Our guest curator Michelle Foa worked closely with Anne Leonard, our Manton Curator for Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, and together, they have created an exhibition that encourages us to consider the artist through a fascinating lens,” said Olivier Meslay, Hardymon Director of the Clark.
Edgar Degas (1834–1917), described by a close friend as “an artisan passionate about all the means of his art,” worked throughout his career with an unusually wide array of media and processes. A close examination of his art-making reveals what one critic called Degas’s “restless searches for new procedures.” He emerges as one of the most technically innovative artists of his time through his experimentation with varied printmaking techniques, his distinctive treatment of pastel, and his frequent combinations of multiple media.
"By focusing on Degas's inventive use of media and techniques, the exhibition demonstrates the rewards of thinking about his works through the lens of their making and materials, rather than just through its motifs,” said Michelle Foa, exhibition co-curator and Associate Professor of Art History at Tulane University and Florence Gould Foundation Fellow at the Clark in spring 2024.
“This exhibition is a welcome opportunity to select from the Clark’s extensive Degas holdings and consider anew this artist’s uniquely experimental approach to materials and techniques. As we mark the 150th anniversary of the first Impressionist Exhibition, Degas’s artistic achievement gains particular salience, positioning him as both central to and distinct from the Impressionist group,” said Anne Leonard, exhibition co-curator and Manton Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Clark.
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
2024 marks the 150th anniversary of the inaugural Impressionist exhibition in 1874, a watershed moment in the history of modern art. Degas had a central but complicated position in the exhibitions held between 1874 and 1886; not only did he participate in many of these events, but he also had a pivotal role in shaping them by inviting many artists to participate. He also criticized some of the key Impressionist precepts and practices, such as working en plein air, meaning outdoors in front of the motif, and their rejection of the studio as a primary space of artistic production.
The exhibition also draws attention to Degas’s friendships with other Impressionist artists who were similarly inclined toward technical experimentation. Degas was close friends with artists who exhibited at his invitation, such as Henri Rouart (French, 1833–1912), Marcellin Desboutin (French, 1823–1902), Ludovic Lepic (French, 1839–1889), Georges Jeanniot (French, 1848–1934), and Mary Cassatt (American, 1844–1926) some of whom shared Degas’s passion for innovative methods of making and are thus crucial to a richer and more nuanced view of his artistic circle.
Drawn from the Clark’s collection of works by Degas and supplemented by select loans, the exhibition seeks to convey his remarkably experimental approach to artistic production, his important role in shaping the Impressionist exhibitions, and his complicated attitude towards Impressionism and some of its key members’ working practices.
MONOTYPES
In the summer of 1876, Degas began experimenting with monotype printing, a process he would continue to work with through the early 1890s. He would take an unetched metal plate and manipulate either black printer’s ink or, later, oil paint, on its surface—using rags, sponges, tools, or his own fingertips—to create an image. Placing a dampened sheet of paper over the inked plate and running them through a press caused the ink to transfer to the paper, resulting in a monotype—so called because only one print was typically made. Degas, however, sometimes pulled a faint second copy to use as the basis for pastel drawings.
Moonrise (c. 1880) is one of several ink monotypes Degas produced from the late 1870s through the early 1880s that demonstrate his persistent interest in landscape. Although this genre has long been misunderstood as marginal or irrelevant to his interests and body of work, in fact Degas produced landscapes steadily over his thirty-year career. What he found objectionable was not the representation of landscape itself but, in particular, plein air painting which other Impressionists favored. The monotypes Degas created in his studio, such as Moonrise, have more to do with a dreamy evocation than a systematic description of landscape features.
Mary Cassatt began participating in the Impressionist exhibitions in 1879, at Degas’s invitation, and the two artists shared a close bond. Both strongly committed to printmaking, they planned a journal in the late 1870s to be called Le Jour et la nuit (Day and Night), the title evoking the black-and-white prints that would feature in it. Though the publication never materialized, Degas produced images of Cassatt during the same period that the two artists worked on the journal (1879–80). The exhibition includes two impressions of a print depicting Cassatt on a visit to the Etruscan Gallery of the Louvre with her sister, Lydia. These were printed using a copperplate before Degas scored it with scratch marks, in a process known as “cancelling.” Cancelling plates ensured that others could not produce and sell additional prints from those plates, as the images would be marred by the incised lines. The exhibition includes the cancelled plate of Mary Cassatt in the Etruscan Gallery of the Louvre. Very late in life, Degas sold a number of his cancelled plates to the dealer Ambroise Vollard. Although few details surrounding the sale are known, presumably Vollard purchased the plates with the intent to print from them and had the artist’s permission to do so.
PASTELS
Artist and close friend Pierre-Georges Jeanniot recalled of Degas, “He had his studio on the Rue Victor-Massé…. I often found him with his hands covered in thick pastel dust,” reminding us of the artist’s particular attachment to pastel. Degas employed pastel in the majority of his works—whether used alone or in combination with other media, applied dry, or crushed and mixed with water or a binder into a paste. Degas manipulated and experimented with pastel in many ways. A young artist even reported seeing Degas place a pastel drawing on the floor of his studio and step firmly on it to make the delicate powder adhere more completely to the paper—a vivid illustration of his unusual approaches to making and his careful consideration of the properties of his materials. Degas’s engagement with pastel provided a critical impetus for a wider revival of the medium among French artists of the late nineteenth century.
In Entrance of the Masked Dancers (c. 1879), Degas subverts conventional expectations by emphasizing the two ballet dancers in the wings, while consigning to the background those performing on stage. He also handles the pastel medium differently across the composition: rather than always using dry sticks, in select areas he has mixed the pastel with water and applied it with a brush. Degas incorporates the gray-brown of the bare paper to evoke the stage and the back of the stage set on the left, demonstrating his characteristic consideration of the relationship between the picture’s material support and the depicted motif.
The motif of a female client being fitted by a dressmaker in At the Dressmaker’s (1882) is very rare for Degas, though closely tied to his well-known depictions of Parisian milliners who sometimes also worked as seamstresses. This pastel was likely produced in the early 1880s and later reworked in the 1890s, reflecting Degas’s tendency to revisit works produced years or even decades earlier. This practice reflects a reluctance on his part ever to consider his pictures finished, preferring instead to view them as perpetual works-in-progress.
Two Dancers Resting (c. 1879), made from gouache selectively overlaid with lighter-colored pastel, is a remarkable example of Degas’s consistently experimental approach to artmaking and his fondness for art’s sometimes wayward materiality. By refusing to rework the substantial, visible drip of medium in the lower right corner, Degas embraces the variable and sometimes unruly behavior of his materials. Moreover, the work was produced from two sheets of paper, with the added strip on the right side allowing Degas to extend the composition, a relatively common practice of his.
FRIENDS AND ASSOCIATES
In late 1895 and early 1896, Degas took up the practice of photography, and most of the photographs he produced depict the artist and his friends in domestic environments. The portrait Ludovic Halévy (c. 1895–96) depicts one of the artist’s closest friends, a writer and playwright.
Writer, painter, and printmaker Marcellin Desboutin exhibited in the second Impressionist Exhibition in 1876, presumably at his friend Degas’s invitation. Desboutin wrote a letter about Degas’s newfound obsession with monotype printing to their mutual friend Giuseppe de Nittis, whose work is displayed in the exhibition. Degas’s and Desboutin’s commitment to printmaking links them to the sitter for Desboutin’s Portrait of Vicomte Ludovic Lepic (1839–1889) (1877). Lepic was, himself, an accomplished and innovative printmaker whose work is also on view in the exhibition.
Italian artist Giuseppe de Nittis moved to Paris in the late 1860s and participated in the first Impressionist Exhibition, very likely at the invitation of Degas. Close to Desboutin and Lepic as well as Degas, de Nittis achieved success in London with etched views such as View of London (c. 1876). Alongside Lepic, he pursued different inkings of his etched plates and, like Degas, began experimenting with monotype in the mid-1870s.
The artist Pierre-Georges Jeanniot bore witness in 1890 to the birth of a new type of picture making by Degas: oil-paint monotypes. It was during a visit to Jeanniot in Diénay, France, that Degas produced a group of remarkable oil monotypes, some overlaid with pastel. In Jeanniot’s essay, Souvenirs sur Degas (Memories of Degas), he gave a detailed account of his friend’s production of these monotypes and confessed to keeping the rag Degas had used to make them, as a memento. A pair of self-portraits by Jeanniot are included in the exhibition.
Camille Pissarro (French, 1830–1903) shared Degas’s experimental approach to intaglio printmaking, and the two artists sometimes tested unorthodox tools and techniques. Degas advised on Pissarro’s Woman Emptying a Wheelbarrow (1880), of which he owned eight impressions, and which has been called “perhaps the most technically complex of all Pissarro’s prints.” In it, Pissarro used an abrasive tool, an emery point—which Degas also used—to scratch into copperplate and produce gray tones in the resulting print.
While brothers Henri and Alexis Rouart were both friends of Degas, Henri in particular was likely Degas’s most intimate friend for much of his adult life. A world-renowned metallurgist, engineer, inventor, and manufacturer, Henri was a major collector as well as an amateur landscape painter whom Degas invited to participate in a few Impressionist exhibitions. In addition to their shared love of art, the two men were both deeply committed to invention and innovation in their respective fields. The distinctive gray tone of Degas’s Two Dancers in the Wings (1879–80) is evidence for the use of a carbon rod (crayon de charbon), same as in his Leaving the Bath series. Degas’s use of carbon rods, components of early electric lamps, exemplifies both his enduring commitment to developing new modes of picture making and his closeness with Rouart, who had long been working on refining the design and manufacture of these rods. It is clear the abrasive character of the linework produced by the carbon rod did not conflict with the delicate dancer subject matter to which Degas applied it.
LEAVING THE BATH
Degas’s penchant for technical experimentation led him to produce several compositions using the sole motif of a female figure wiping herself dry after a bath. While the figures’ postures and gestures are nearly identical, she appears in different media—first charcoal, then several distinct lithographic printings—and the setting around her shifts, depending on how Degas adds to or subtracts from the composition. For example, a maidservant seen offering the bather a towel is elsewhere reduced to a set of fingertips or disappears entirely. Degas was somewhat unusual in producing multiple states for his lithographs; these test proofs marking changes to a composition were generally more common in intaglio printing, since alterations to a copperplate were more labor-intensive and harder to see than on a lithographic stone.
The series Leaving the Bath originated in an evening Degas spent in the home of Alexis Rouart, located in the same compound as the Rouart family’s factory. Degas made this print with a carbon rod which he likely found in the Rouart factory, an element of early electric lamps that Henri Rouart had been working for years to improve and produce. Similarly, Degas continued revising Leaving the Bath relentlessly over a series of at least twenty-two variations, called “states,” more than he made for any other print. Five states are on view in the exhibition. In each state, Degas intensified his work on the copperplate or burnished it away, thereby emphasizing different degrees of contrast between dark and light and causing some details to emerge and others to recede.
Edgar Degas: Multi-Media Artist in the Age of Impressionism is organized by the Clark Art Institute and curated by Michelle Foa, Associate Professor of Art History at Tulane University and Florence Gould Foundation Fellow at the Clark in spring 2024 and Anne Leonard, Manton Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs.
Generous support for this exhibition is provided by the Malcolm Hewitt Wiener Foundation.
RELATED EVENTS
Opening Lecture: Edgar Degas: Multi-Media Artist in the Age of Impressionism
Saturday, July 13, 11 am
Auditorium, Manton Research Center
Michelle Foa, Associate Professor of Art History at Tulane University, introduces the exhibition.
Free. Accessible seats available; for information, call 413 458 0524.
Works on Paper Highlights Talk: Edgar Degas Bonus Selection
Wednesday, August 21, 1 pm
Manton Study Center for Works on Paper, Manton Research Center
As a complement to the Edgar Degas exhibition on view in the adjacent Eugene V. Thaw Gallery, enjoy further examples from the Clark’s rich trove of works on paper by this innovative Impressionist artist. In the third of this summer's Works on Paper Highlights Talks, Anne Leonard, Manton Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, describes the selection process for the exhibition and traces Degas’s progression from early academic training to artistic maturity as an unrivaled draughtsman and printmaker.
Visit the Manton Study Center for Works on Paper, which houses the Clark's collection of more than 6,500 prints, drawings, and photographs. Each week, discover a unique selection of rarely exhibited works on paper with a member of the curatorial department. Offered Wednesdays in August from 1–1:30 pm.
Free. Capacity is limited. Seating is first-come, first-served.
Public Programs
A full slate of public programs, including curatorial lectures, dance performances, artist conversations, artmaking workshops, and gallery tours is planned throughout the run of the exhibition; details are available at clarkart.edu/events.
ABOUT THE CLARK
The Clark Art Institute, located in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, is one of a small number of institutions globally that is both an art museum and a center for research, critical discussion, and higher education in the visual arts. Opened in 1955, the Clark houses exceptional European and American paintings and sculpture, extensive collections of master prints and drawings, English silver, and early photography. Acting as convener through its Research and Academic Program, the Clark gathers an international community of scholars to participate in a lively program of conferences, colloquia, and workshops on topics of vital importance to the visual arts. The Clark library, consisting of some 300,000 volumes, is one of the nation’s premier art history libraries. The Clark also houses and co-sponsors the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art.
The Clark, which has a three-star rating in the Michelin Green Guide, is located at 225 South Street in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Its 140-acre campus includes miles of hiking and walking trails through woodlands and meadows, providing an exceptional experience of art in nature. Galleries are open 10 am to 5 pm Tuesday through Sunday from September through June, and daily in July and August. Open 10 am to 9 pm on Wednesdays from June 19 through September 25, with free admission from 5 to 9 pm. Admission is free January through March and is $20 from March through December; admission is free year-round for Clark members, all visitors age 21 and under, and students with a valid student ID. Free admission is also available through several programs, including First Sundays Free; a local library pass program; and EBT Card to Culture. For information on these programs and more, visit clarkart.edu or call 413 458 2303.
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