Dialogues with Degas - Influence and Antagonism in Contemporary Art

Dialogues with Degas demonstrates the ongoing relevance of Edgar Degas to 20th- and 21st-century ideas and art practices. The first in-depth examination of this major artist’s impact on contemporary art, this book charts how contemporary practitioners have used Degas’s creativity as a springboard to engage imaginatively and critically with themes of colonialism, gender, race and class. Individual chapters are devoted to different dialogues between Degas’s painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture and art produced from the 1980s to the present. Through close analyses of selected works, Kathryn Brown explores how Degas’s technical experiments have been tested and extended in innovative ways. The artists selected for this study have explicitly taken up, developed or challenged Degas’s technical and compositional experiments; they include Frank Auerbach, Cecily Brown, Ryan Gander, Maggi Hambling, Damien Hirst, Howard Hodgkin, R.B. Kitaj, Paula Rego, Yinka Shonibare and Cy Twombly. By submitting existing compositions to new technical and imaginative experiments, these artists generate visual palimpsests that make new demands of the viewer and reveal the meanings that accrue to artworks as they circulate within different spatial, temporal and institutional networks. The book overturns familiar conceptions of influence by showing how the art historical canon can be challenged from a position within it and by making the case that a close examination of dialogues with Degas generates a way of writing art history that eschews genealogies. Prioritizing, instead, the analysis of non-linear and conceptual encounters between images generates a new conception of the agency of artworks and of the dialogues they are capable of entertaining with other works. While this study will shed new light on Degas’s art and that of his interlocutors, it will also have methodological significance for the writing of art history.