These days, Degas abandons himself entirely to his new passion for photography, wrote an artist friend in autumn 1895, the moment of the great Impressionist painter's most intense exploration of photography. Degas's major surviving photographs little known even among devotees of the artist's paintings and pastels, are insightfully analyzed and richly reproduced for the first time in this volume, which accompanies an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Biblioth???que Nationale de ...
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These days, Degas abandons himself entirely to his new passion for photography, wrote an artist friend in autumn 1895, the moment of the great Impressionist painter's most intense exploration of photography. Degas's major surviving photographs little known even among devotees of the artist's paintings and pastels, are insightfully analyzed and richly reproduced for the first time in this volume, which accompanies an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Biblioth???que Nationale de France. Degas's photographic figure studies, portraits of friends and family, and self-portraits-especially those in which lamp-lit figures emerge from darkness--are imbued with a Symbolist spirit evocative of realms more psychological than physical. Most were made in the evenings, when Degas transformed dinner parties into photographic soirees, requisitioning the living rooms of his friends, arranging oil lamps, and directing the poses of dinner guests enlisted as models. He went back and forth . . . running from one end of the room to the other with an expression of infinite happiness, wrote Daniel Hal???vy, the son of Degas's close friends Ludovic and Louise Hal???vy, describing one such evening. At half-past eleven everybody left; Degas, surrounded by three laughing girls, carried his camera as proudly as a child carrying a rifle. Lively eyewitness accounts of Degas's photographic activity from the journals of Daniel Hal???vy and Julie Manet, as well as from Degas's own letters, are included in Malcolm Daniel's essay, The Atmosphere of Lamps or Moonlight, which presents a fascinating account of Degas's brief but passionate embrace of photography. Daniel explores the psychological connection between events in the aging artist's life and his decision to take up the camera and demonstrates the aesthetic connections between Degas's photographs and his work in other media. Eugenia Parry's essay, Edgar Degas's Photographic Theater, illuminates the fertile interplay between painting, posing, theatrical direction, and photography in Degas's work, and Theodore Reff, in Degas Chez Tasset, sheds light on the hitherto barely known Guillaume Tasset and his daughter Delphine, from whom Degas sought photographic supplies, advice, and services. Finally, this volume includes a scholarly catalogue raisonn??? and census of prints, an essential tool for further study of Degas's photographs. [This book was originally published in 1998 and has gone out of print. This edition is a print-on-demand version of the original book.] Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press
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Publisher:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Published:
1998
Language:
English
Alibris ID:
17967467899
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Seller's Description:
VG/VG. Black cloth/boards with silver lettering. Bw photographic dj with white lettering. 144 pp. with 106 illustrations: 40 tritones, 63 duotones, and 3 in color. Publication in conjunction with the exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oct. 14, 1998 to Jan. 3, 1999; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Feb. 2-March 28, 1999; and the Bibliothèque nationale, Paris, May 11 to July 31, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 140-141) and index. "Degas's major surviving photographs, little known even among devotees of the artist's paintings and pastels, are analyzed and reproduced for the first time in this volume, which accompanies an exhibition at The Metropolitan Muscum of Art, The J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Bibliotheque Nationale de France."--Jacket. Contents as follows: Foreword / Philippe de Montebello--Preface / Malcolm Daniel--"The Atmosphere of Lamps or Moonlight" / Malcolm Daniel--Edgar Degas's Photographic Theater / Eugenia Parry--Degas Chez Tasset / Theodore Reff--Plates--Catalogue Raisonne of Degas's Photographs and Census of Known Prints / Malcolm Daniel.
