Lecture Series | The Art and Life of Edgar Degas – Roberta Crisci-Richardson | NGV International

Edgar Degas Family portrait (Portrait de famille), also called The Bellelli family 1867 oil on canvas 201.0 x 249.5 cm Lemoisne 79 Musée d'Orsay, Paris (RF 2210) © Musée d'Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt

Edgar Degas
Family portrait (Portrait de famille), also called The Bellelli family 1867
oil on canvas
201.0 x 249.5 cm
Lemoisne 79
Musée d’Orsay, Paris (RF 2210)
© Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt

Throughout art history Edgar Degas has been categorised as a nationalist, misogynist and experimental artist. But, is this an accurate portrayal? Considering Degas’s life and work from the streets of Paris to the walls of the salon – who was Degas really?

In a series of three lectures, Dr Roberta Crisci-Richardson, author of Mapping Degas, challenges popular notions of Degas by considering his life and work in his context of nineteenth century France.

Speaker
Dr Roberta Crisci-Richardson, art historian, author of Mapping Degas: Real Spaces, Symbolic Spaces and Invented Spaces in the Life and Work of Edgar Degas (1834–1917)

Book for the series or individually via the NGV website: http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/program/the-art-and-life-of-edgar-degas/
Cost: $16 M / $20 A / $18 C (individual lecture) $44 M / $55 A / $50 C (series)

Sat 30 Jul, 2pm | Is There Life Beyond Paris?

To Degas the city of 19th Century Paris was a site of extraordinary modern existential possibilities a repository for his imagery of ‘Parisianness’. See Paris through the eyes of the most Parisian of painters in this lecture focusses on the city, its surrounds and influence on Degas.

Sat 13 Aug, 2pm | Beauty and the Beast: Degas and Women

Edouard Manet famously claimed that Degas was “incapable of loving a woman”. Recent art history has popularised this idea, interpreting his images of women as misogynistic and evidence of the artist’s sexism. Revisiting this popular view, explore the artist’s images of women and his attitude to femininity within the broader context of feminisation in aesthetic modernity.

Sat 27 Aug, 2pm | Transgressing the Boundaries: Edgar Degas and the Salon

The prevailing view in art historical circles is that Degas was a classicist painter. However, Degas’s complex and liberatory relationship with the museum and Salon system suggests that Degas was far from dedicated to the clarity, precision and sense of proportion associated with ancient art. Take a closer look at the variety of irregular formal canons Degas embraced in order to self-fashion himself as a Northern European neo-baroque painter of small portraits and genre scenes.

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