“I will descend the slope very quickly and roll down I don’t know where, wrapped in many bad pastel drawings’’:

Or, Degas, on the Ground

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Abstract:

“Where has the time gone when I thought I was strong, when I was full of logic, full of projects? I will descend the slope very quickly and roll down I don’t know where, wrapped in many bad pastel drawings.” So wrote Edgar Degas in a letter to a close friend in 1884, the image of him falling down a hill intended to evoke a sense of professional and personal despair. That Degas chose this particular metaphor to convey his distress is entirely in keeping with the pivotal role that the representation of weight, gravity, ground, and equilibrium played in his practice. While his ballet and equestrian pictures have long been understood as expressions of his attraction to the fashionable spectacles of his day, this talk will reframe these works and others by the artists as meditations on the relationship of bodies to the ground beneath them.

What emerges is a new understanding of Degas’s interest in testing the possibilities and limits of representation, in devising strategies for evoking the phenomena of weight and gravity in his pictures, and in identifying motifs that point to the conditions of his pictures’ making. A persistent impulse to rethink representation in material terms and to view the matter of art in light of its capacity to convey the heft and substance of the world and to foreground the relationship of bodies to the terrain beneath them, drove both how Degas made his pictures and his attachment to some of his most celebrated subjects

Biography:

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 articles on the artist have been published in The Art Bulletin and Art History, as well as in exhibition catalogues and other journals. In 2024, she co-curated the exhibition “Edgar Degas: Multi-Media Artist in the Age of Impressionism” at the Clark Art Institute. 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 in Paris.