Bloomsbury 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 dialogues between Degas’s works and art produced from the 1980s to the present, covering the work of 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 tested, extended or challenged in innovative ways. By submitting existing compositions to new technical and imaginative experiments, these artists generate visual palimpsests that make new demands of the viewer and reveal meanings that accrue to artworks as they circulate within different spatial, temporal and institutional networks. Enacting transtemporal dialogues, the book overturns familiar conceptions of influence by eschewing a genealogical approach, challenging the art historical canon from within. Prioritising the analysis of non-linear encounters between images encourages a new conception of the agency of artworks and of the conversations they are capable of entertaining with other works. 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.