Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Individual Artists
Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty Details
Review More than 120 illustrations alternate with concise essays, offering an ideal way… to view these precursors of works by today’s most interesting figurative artists. (Christopher Lyon Bookforum)An exceptionally complex and intriguing exhibition, which makes the best possible use of an array of works seldom seen in one place. Together they constitute a genuine portrait of the artist. (Anka Muhlstein The New York Review of Books)It was his work in monotype that reveals the true extent of his restless experimentation... With this medium, Degas is at his most modern, liberating drawing from tradition, depicting the body in new and daring ways, and boldly engaging the possibilities of abstraction. (James A. Cox Midwest Book Review)Breathtaking... There are visual pleasures here that you will never see anywhere else. (Deborah Solomon WNYC)“A Strange New Beauty” brings a new logic and coherence to Degas’s experimentation... It makes the past feel alive and useful. (Roberta Smith The New York Times)That sense of expanded possibility pervades Degas’s work in monotype, and carries over into other aspects of his art. (Susan Delson The Wall Street Journal)...reveals the inveterate experimentalist behind the tutus. (Andrea K. Scott The New Yorker)In monotype, even his ballet dancers leap into new territory. (The Wall Street Journal)Degas at his most blissfully experimental. (Adam Lehrer Forbes) Read more About the Author Jodi Hauptmann is Senior Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.Carol Armstrong is Professor of History of Art at Yale University.Jonas Beyer is Professor in the Department of Art History at the Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen.Kathryn Brown is a specialist in modern French painting, literature and contemporary art and lectures at Tilburg University, The Netherlands.Karl Buchberg is Senior Conservator, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.Hollis Clayson is Professor of Art History and Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities at Northwestern University.Samantha Friedman is Assistant Curator of Department of Drawings and Prints at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.Richard Kendall is Curator-at-Large, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, New York.Laura Neufeld is Assistant Conservator at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.Stephanie O’Rourke is former Mellon Fellow at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.Raisa Rexer is a freelance art critic and instructor of French at Yeshiva University and City College, CUNY.Jill DeVonyar is an Art historian. Read more
Reviews
The landscapes alone are worth the price. They will blow your mind. It's too bad when the illustrations aren't as generous as they could be. Design and negative space are great things, but I too will complain about the capacious margins. But you know what? You'll be dead before another book is published on the subject.I will note a certain displeasure. In recent years, art books seem to be more about those assembling the pages. As with numerous monographs of late you have to wonder what's more important, the art on display or the essayists involved. About a dozen academics get publishing credits with this book. Which would be okay if there was a central editing post. Instead you get, say, a bunch of words wasted on numerous cursory explanations of Degas' otherwise revolutionary dark-field/light-field monotypes. You hear echos of the same phrasings.But trust me. If you couldn't go to the exhibition, you'll want to study the pages of this book.
