.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
拍品專文
In the mid-1870s, Degas began to experiment more regularly with pastel: finely ground, powdery pigments bound together with a sticky gum and rolled into saturated sticks of color. By the following decade, most of Degas’s artistic production was in pastel—including sketches and studies for paintings or sculptures, as well as more finished works on paper. Femmes assises sur l’herbe, drawn circa 1882, represents one of Degas’s bold forays in depicting the female body with this medium at the height of the Impressionist era.
In Femmes assises sur l’herbe, three slender young women recline casually upon a bed of pale green grass. The women are all dressed in plain cotton dresses of lavender, olive green or chestnut brown, all cinched with belts at the waist and adorned with a simple ruffle at the hem. Degas rendered the setting ambiguous, intentionally so; the trio may be sprawled on the ground in a private garden or public park—or perhaps alongside a popular Parisian racetrack, as suggested by curator Esther Bell in the 2017 exhibition catalogue, Degas, Impressionism, and the Paris Millinery Trade. Whatever the context, the figures’ hunched postures and unselfconsciously stretched legs suggests they are quite at ease. Whether they are in the midst of a private conversation or lost in their own thoughts, the women seem completely unaware they are being observed by the artist.
As Femmes assises sur l’herbe clearly demonstrates, Degas was quite willing to experiment with new compositional strategies—and to render strange even the most quotidian of subjects. Degas viewed the scene from an oblique perspective, as if standing above and to the left of his seated subjects. He radically cropped the composition along the upper and right edges of the sheet, eliminating the torsos, shoulders and heads of the two women seated in the upper right corner. The third woman’s full figure has been left intact, but she is seen only from behind. Viewed from this awkward angle, her body appears to be nearly folded in half, like an abandoned doll. Her brown bonnet obscures her face, and renders her gesture illegible. In this way, Degas seems to deliberately reveal and conceal certain crucial details, stimulating the viewer’s curiosity.
Indeed, Degas was fond of spatial oddities and fragmented bodies; these compositional quirks were in fact crucial to his modernist project. Degas sought to capture the unexpected, disorienting angles produced by a a voyeuristic gaze or a quick glance—and thus to mimic the physical limitations of vision as we move through space. Works like Femmes assises sur l’herbe convey a sense of immediacy and truth, rather unlike the contrived and artificial arrangements that had defined French art of the previous century.
Degas drew this pastel around 1882, the same year as the seventh and penultimate Impressionist exhibition in Paris. After a bitter disagreement over which artists should be included, Degas (as well as his friend and colleague, the American painter Mary Cassatt) refused to participate in the show; Degas would only agree to join the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition four years later. In 1882, Degas turned instead to his own personal projects, including a series of pastel works on paper devoted to various modern Parisian figures: jockeys, bathers, laundresses and millinery shop girls. Like several other works produced around this time, Femmes assises sur l’herbe remained in the artist’s collection until his death, and was later sold in the second posthumous sale of his estate in December 1918. After passing through the collection of Ambroise Vollard—an advocate of many avant-garde draftsmen, including Paul Cezanne and Vincent van Gogh—this pastel was acquired by Ann and Gordon Getty in 1987.
In Femmes assises sur l’herbe, three slender young women recline casually upon a bed of pale green grass. The women are all dressed in plain cotton dresses of lavender, olive green or chestnut brown, all cinched with belts at the waist and adorned with a simple ruffle at the hem. Degas rendered the setting ambiguous, intentionally so; the trio may be sprawled on the ground in a private garden or public park—or perhaps alongside a popular Parisian racetrack, as suggested by curator Esther Bell in the 2017 exhibition catalogue, Degas, Impressionism, and the Paris Millinery Trade. Whatever the context, the figures’ hunched postures and unselfconsciously stretched legs suggests they are quite at ease. Whether they are in the midst of a private conversation or lost in their own thoughts, the women seem completely unaware they are being observed by the artist.
As Femmes assises sur l’herbe clearly demonstrates, Degas was quite willing to experiment with new compositional strategies—and to render strange even the most quotidian of subjects. Degas viewed the scene from an oblique perspective, as if standing above and to the left of his seated subjects. He radically cropped the composition along the upper and right edges of the sheet, eliminating the torsos, shoulders and heads of the two women seated in the upper right corner. The third woman’s full figure has been left intact, but she is seen only from behind. Viewed from this awkward angle, her body appears to be nearly folded in half, like an abandoned doll. Her brown bonnet obscures her face, and renders her gesture illegible. In this way, Degas seems to deliberately reveal and conceal certain crucial details, stimulating the viewer’s curiosity.
Indeed, Degas was fond of spatial oddities and fragmented bodies; these compositional quirks were in fact crucial to his modernist project. Degas sought to capture the unexpected, disorienting angles produced by a a voyeuristic gaze or a quick glance—and thus to mimic the physical limitations of vision as we move through space. Works like Femmes assises sur l’herbe convey a sense of immediacy and truth, rather unlike the contrived and artificial arrangements that had defined French art of the previous century.
Degas drew this pastel around 1882, the same year as the seventh and penultimate Impressionist exhibition in Paris. After a bitter disagreement over which artists should be included, Degas (as well as his friend and colleague, the American painter Mary Cassatt) refused to participate in the show; Degas would only agree to join the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition four years later. In 1882, Degas turned instead to his own personal projects, including a series of pastel works on paper devoted to various modern Parisian figures: jockeys, bathers, laundresses and millinery shop girls. Like several other works produced around this time, Femmes assises sur l’herbe remained in the artist’s collection until his death, and was later sold in the second posthumous sale of his estate in December 1918. After passing through the collection of Ambroise Vollard—an advocate of many avant-garde draftsmen, including Paul Cezanne and Vincent van Gogh—this pastel was acquired by Ann and Gordon Getty in 1987.