Degas: Beyond Impressionism (National Gallery London Publications)

One of the leading figures in the Impressionist movement, Degas is celebrated for his sumptuous pictures of the ballet, his revolutionary studies of laundresses and prostitutes, and his richly colored pastels of the female nude. After the last Impressionist exhibition in 1886, however, Degas's career has been shrouded in mystery. He exhibited sporadically and began to hoard his work in his studio. Though he lived for three more decades, the pictures and sculptures of this last period have remained an enigma and were largely unknown to the general public until a number were seen in a massive Degas retrospective, shown in Paris, New York, and Ottawa in 1988-9.

This strikingly beautiful book--the first to focus on Degas's late work--presents a new and definitive view of his last decades. Richard Kendall explodes some of the myths about Degas's life, such as his reclusiveness and his alleged blindness. He also discusses the major issues of the artist's later career, describing his position in the art world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the circumstances in which his sculptures were made, and the important shifts in technique, subject matter, and marketing strategy of his final decades. Kendall investigates the obsessive themes of the late period--the ballet, the toilette, the female bather--and demonstrates the graphic and structural daring of Degas's imagery. The remarkable body of drawings, pastels, oil paintings, and sculptures presented here are both visually dramatic and conceptually challenging, involving startling explorations of color, unexpected combinations of technique and media, and a radical reexamination of the human figure. In fact, says Kendall, Degas played an integral role in the fundamental reshaping of the visual arts that took place at the turn of the century among the generations that followed Impressionism.