Degas’ Dust

Michelle Foa, PhD

Associate Professor of Art History, Tulane University

Described by a close friend as “an artisan passionate about all the means of his art,” Degas’ body of work reflects a sustained fascination with material and technical experimentation. Michelle Foa’s lecture will shed new light on the artist’s persistent engagement with an unusual array of media and processes over the course of his career, particularly his innovative use of pastel. Careful examination of his pictures and of friends’ accounts of his studio and working processes demonstrates his remarkable use of media to depict his subjects in entirely new ways and to expand the limits of pictorial representation. Degas’ “restless searches for new procedures,” as one critic put it, and his constant testing of the behaviors and capacities of his media and tools, reveal an artist for whom the life of matter and the matter of art were central to the meaning of his pictures.