![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
I consider materiality as a lens of art historical analysis and demonstrate how this critical framework drives us to examine the agency not just of the visible and tangible substance of a work, but also of the unseen experiences of the artist, the medium, and the viewer. Focusing on a pastel by Edgar Degas, I further contend that study of the material depths and visceral procedures of objects in this medium reveals that the artist, who would have blown away the excess dusts that accumulated as he worked, is uniquely embedded in the very material fabric of the image.
KEYWORDS:
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Note on the contributor
Marni Kessler is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Kress Foundation Department of Art History at the University of Kansas. She is the author of Discomfort Food: The Culinary Imagination in Late Nineteenth-Century French Art, published by University of Minnesota Press in 2021, and Sheer Presence: The Veil in Manet’s Paris. She has also authored articles and essays on topics related to portraiture, urbanism, photography, food, materiality, and fashion.
Notes
1 Many thanks to the editors of Dix-Neuf for the invitation to contribute to this volume and an extra measure of gratitude to Masha Belenky for her feedback and encouragement. Thoughtful critique from Susan Kuretsky and Rachel Mesch vastly improved this essay. Angelica Daneo and Emily Willkim of the Denver Art Museum graciously shared with me the conservation report on Three Women at the Races. Jodi Hauptman worked her magic and helped me to secure permission to reproduce Degas’s At the Races. Finally, the Kress Foundation Department of Art History Development Fund covered the expenses associated with acquiring image files and permissions.
We know from various contemporary accounts and more recent conservation reports about Degas’s idiosyncratic employment of fixative throughout the process of creating a work and the fact that he chose not to use commercially available fixative. According to his friends Ambroise Vollard and Étienne Moreau-Nelaton, Degas used a product that was created for him by his friend and fellow artist Luigi Chialiva. Moreau-Nelaton conveys, based on an interview with Degas, that ‘Il fixe ses pastels avec un fixatif dont Chialiva lui a fait présent et dont celui-ci possède le secret’ (Moreau-Nelaton Citation1931, 269). See also Vollard Citation1938, 122. Vollard also provides one of the reports regarding Degas’s method for applying fixative as he worked so that he could secure his fragile layers of crayon and establish durable surfaces upon which to build: [‘Il était d’autant plus nécessaire pour Degas d’avoir un bon fixative, que ses pastels étant “repris” longuement, et devant être fixes avant chaque reprise, il importait d’obtenir une parfaite adhérence entre toutes les couches de couleurs’ (Vollard Citation1938, 122).] Denis Rouart offers another concise account of this aspect of Degas’s working method: ‘He repeated this operation of fixing and placing the colors many times until the completion of the painting, that is until a point at which he felt satisfied with the work’ (Rouart Citation1988, 64). This text was originally published in 1945 as Degas à la recherche de sa technique.
2 The conservation analysis completed by Citationthe National Gallery of Canada, Restoration and Conservation Laboratory for the Denver Art Museum on Three Women at the Races specifies that the work is composed on light brown medium wove paper that is attached to a three-ply grey cardboard.
3 The conservation report on Three Women at the Races confirms that he most likely did not apply fixative to the final layer: ‘The pastel is executed in successive layers of colours which are intermittently fixed’ and ‘the top layer of colours does not appear to be fixed’.
4 Anne F. Maheux informs us that Degas likely purchased his pastels from one of the oldest and most reputable maisons de pastels in Paris, Henri Roché (Maheux and Boggs, Citation1992, 20).
5 The body of literature on materiality in relation to the field of art history is vast. See especially Lange-Berndt Citation2015; Athanassoglu-Kallmyer, Citation2019; Rosler et al. Citation2013; Thielmans Citation2015; Roberts Citation2017; Zorach Citation2018. For a recent particularly fine example of scholarship that uses materiality as a lens for analysis, see Anna Arabindan-Kessen’s Citation2021 Black Bodies, White Gold, which places cotton – as physical substance, as object that was cultivated and that circulated, and in visual representation – within the complex nexus of the transatlantic slave trade, empire, and colonialism in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. Explicating cotton as conceptual space and material reality, Arabindan-Kessen crafts a masterful argument about how the product shaped and continues to shape and embody critical histories of Blackness and the Black diaspora.
6 In his oft-quoted 2011 essay, Michael Yonan points out that, ‘materiality … has been an implicit dimension of art-historical inquiry for more than a century’ (Yonan Citation2011, 233).
7 It goes without saying that the COVID-19 pandemic has reminded us of the profound significance, fragility, meanings, and very real threats contained in air and breath.
8 Jean Sutherland Boggs estimates that Degas produced more than seven hundred pastels over the course of his career (Boggs Citation1992, 7). She locates his ‘first, tentative gestures toward pastel … in the works of the early 1860s, when he included a touch of it in the drawing for Semiramis Building Babylon’ (Boggs Citation1992, 10). He made his first full-fledged pastels of the sea in Normandy during the summer of 1869 and, by the early 1870s, used the medium more regularly for works that include figures. By 1876, he was extending further the compass of pastel by employing it to realize richly hued and complex layers over monotypes and charcoal drawings. See Boggs Citation1992, 11–13.
9 See note 2.
10 Anne F. Maheux explains that: ‘Attempts to identify Degas’s secret fixative formula have met with limited success. Recent analysis has revealed the possibility that Degas may have formulated a fixative based on casein, and previous research has identified the presence of a resinous medium’ (Maheux Citation1992, 35). Richard Kendall aptly describes fixative as having a ‘role as a creative vehicle rather than a stabilizing force’ for Degas (Kendall Citation2002, 23).
11 See Rouart Citation1988, 64.
12 Facini et al. Citation2017, 127.
13 Maheux Citation1992, 32.
14 Paul Valéry, for example, was one of the earlier authors to focus on Degas’s deep connection to materials and what he called the artist’s ‘operative’ strategies (Valéry Citation1948). More recently, Jodi Hauptman beautifully captures the artist’s intense engagement with his materials (Hauptman Citation2016, 12–19).
15 A basic Google search will reveal widespread debates about the possible toxicity of certain pastel pigments and general concerns about the harmful effect of inhaling pastel dust and it coming into prolonged contact with the skin.
16 Sugata Ray relatedly finds, in Stella Kramrisch’s 1931 essay on the Sarnath Buddha, a model ‘for a reimagination of sovereignty as breath … [a route to] deracinate the Eurocentrism that still haunts our discipline today’ (Ray Citation2020, 43). Ray further argues that ‘thinking through the political ecology of air and breathing’ holds decolonizing potential for the field (Ray Citation2020, 46). While my essay does not directly contribute to the important task of decolonizing the discipline, I would like to think that, in attending to breath as a powerful tool of analysis and in foregrounding the agency of the object, this study might offer a new lens for re-envisioning an art history that destabilizes certain fixed understandings of the images and thus what may constitute the very matter of art. For an excellent collection of a variety of scholars’ responses to questions regarding a decolonized art history, see Grant and Price Citation2020.
17 See, for example, Kessler Citation2018.
18 Kessler Citation2006. Interestingly, the first part of the title of my dissertation from which the book grew was ‘Sheer Material Presence’.
19 While we do not know for certain whether Degas titled the painting, we do know that when it was sold at the posthumous sale of his work at the Galerie Georges Petit in 1918, its title was Aux courses (trois femmes causant) (Galerie Georges Petit Citation1918-Citation19, 163).
20 For an exhaustive study of this theme in Degas’s oeuvre, see Boggs Citation1998.
21 See, for example, The Gentlemen’s Race: Before the Start, 1862; reworked c. 1882 [Musée d’Orsay, Paris] and The Parade (Racehorses Before the Stands), 1866–72 [Musée d’Orsay, Paris]. For an extended discussion of At the Races, see Kessler Citation2006, 56–58.
22 According to the conservation report, ‘The profile of the left figure has been altered at least twice.’