“I would have been in mortal misery all my life for fear my wife might say, ‘That’s a pretty little thing,’ after I had finished a picture.”
Edgar Degas was a misanthrope, a fiercely independent innovator and, perhaps unsurprisingly, a lifelong bachelor. Although working and exhibiting alongside the Impressionists, he scowled at their plein air paintings.
Ever the contrarian, among the 200 pieces collected from museums and galleries as far flung as Sao Paolo and Hiroshima, you might not expect to discover “Degas the landscape artist”, says NGV curator Ted Gott. “Especially given his constant insistence that he was a Realist, not an Impressionist, for whom “nature is the enemy”.
There’s a sense of a relentless search for new angles, forms and methods – including, says Gott, “jumping up and down on his pastels to create dense ground layers” and “scorching the surface” of some of his works.
Though born into a well-heeled family and remembered foremost as a chronicler of ballet and horse racing, Degas was not deterred by criticism and scandal to complete “monotype studies of sex workers in a Parisian brothel” in the late 1870s.
The studies remain surprising for “both the frankness and mundanity” with which Degas approached the risqué subject. “In his eyes”, says Gott, “these were studies of working women, and it is their boredom and exhaustion in their downtimes between clients that he documents.”
Degas’s impression on modern and contemporary art endures largely because of “his abandonment, at a radically early stage (beginning of the 1860s) of accepted notions of ‘finish’ in his paintings”, says Gott. Meanwhile, his subject matter of “human behaviour, human psychology and emotion” remains as timely as ever.
Degas: A New Vision
NGV International
24 June – 18 September
Past meets present in Leyla Steven’s latest exhibition, now showing at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and co-curated by Artspace. The Australian-Balinese artists adopts a collaborative approach to restitution, scrutinising the systems of conservation and documentation we have inherited.
Developed in 2022 by Artback NT as part of Apmere Mparntwe—the Australian Ceramics Triennale— touring exhibition Clay on Country, showing now at New England Regional Art Museum, showcases the diversity of ceramics in the Central Desert.
About Face is a smart piece of marketing. The new book on portrait painting from Australia and New Zealand has a mission to change buyers’ minds about the field. But as Jane O’Sullivan discovers, any sales pitch wears thin if it’s repeated often enough, and the close attention to how portrait painting is received by the market means that other important conversations fade to the background.
Born in 1948, Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto works with photography, site-specific sculpture and architecture. Time Machine at the Museum of Contemporary Art surveys over five decades of his work, highlighting his conceptual approach to images and his continual investigation of the photographic form.
Natalya Hughes has a conflicted fascination with modernist men like Freud, Kirchner and de Kooning. Jane O’Sullivan takes a look at The Interior, the Institute of Modern Art monograph on her recent practice, and discovers difficult and provocative questions about not just the representation of women in art and culture, but also the careers of women artists in Australia.
The National Gallery of Victoria has announced the next instalment of the Winter Masterpieces series, coming in June 2025, will be a return to French Impressionism—an exhibition from 2021 that closed as soon as it opened due to the global pandemic.
