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 explores 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 dialogues between Degas's art and works produced by Frank Auerbach, Cecily Brown, Xinyi Cheng, Ryan Gander, Maggi Hambling, Damien Hirst, Howard Hodgkin, Chantal Joffe, Leon Kossoff, R.B. Kitaj, Juan Muñoz, Paula Rego, Jenny Saville, Yinka Shonibare, Cy Twombly and Rebecca Warren. Through close analyses of selected paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures, Kathryn Brown explores how Degas's technical and compositional experiments have been extended or challenged in innovative ways. By experimenting with the materials and methods of existing works, contemporary artists generate visual palimpsests that make new demands of the viewer and prompt a reconsideration of ideas that have informed histories of 19th-century French art. The book overturns familiar conceptions of influence by eschewing a genealogical approach and prioritizing, instead, the analysis of non-linear encounters between artworks. This encourages a new conception of the agency of visual artefacts and of the conversations they are capable of entertaining with each other. While this study sheds new light on Degas's art and that of his interlocutors, it also has methodological significance for the writing of art history.

An intriguing, marvelously illustrated, landmark survey of this popular painter's work.

Drawings and color reproductions of Degas's paintings are presented along with excerpts from his writings.

'The wind is rising!... Let us try to live!' One of the preeminent intellectuals of modern French culture, Val?ry is widely considered one of the country's greatest poets of the twentieth century. Following a flurry of sonnets in his late teens, he abruptly abandoned verse for twenty years. If the publication of The Young Fate in 1917 won him immediate and immense acclaim, his status as the outstanding poet of the era was firmly consolidated with the Album of Early Verse and Charms with its beautiful meditation on mortality, 'The Graveyard by the Sea', considered one of the finest poems in French. A classical voice in an era of avant-garde modernism, Val?ry's often sensuous work was inspired by mysticism, myth, the Mediterranean, and above all passionate love. This bilingual edition brings together for the first time the complete verse with many unknown and previously unpublished poems taken from his abundant correspondence, which offers intimate insight into a private side of the writer.

Friends, rivals, and at times antagonists, Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas maintained a pictorial dialogue throughout their lives as they both worked to define the painting of modern urban life. Manet/Degas, the first book to consider their careers in parallel, investigates how their objectives overlapped, diverged, and shaped each other’s artistic choices. Enlivened by archival correspondence and records of firsthand accounts, essays by American and French scholars take a fresh look at the artists’ family relationships, literary friendships, and interconnected social and intellectual circles in Paris; explore their complex depictions of race and class; discuss their political views in the context of wars in France and the United States; compare their artistic practices; and examine how Degas built his personal collection of works by Manet after his friend’s premature death. An illustrated biographical chronology charts their intersecting lives and careers. This lavishly illustrated, in-depth study offers an opportunity to reevaluate some of the most canonical French artworks of the nineteenth century, including Manet’s Olympia, Degas’s The Absinthe Drinker, and other masterworks.