28
●
EDGAR DEGAS
Femme nue debout à sa toilette
.
Lithograph printed in black on smooth, cream wove paper, 1891-92. 333x245 mm;
13
1
/
2
x9
3
/
4
inches, full margins. Sixth state (of 6). One of approximately 12 impressions in
this state (from a combined approximately 40 impressions in all 6 states). Signed or
inscribed with Degas’s name in pencil, lower left. Printed by Auguste Clot, Paris.
Ex-collection the printer, Auguste Clot, Paris, with a signed attestation by the printer’s
grandson, Guy Georges, dated Paris, May 1, 1996.
According to Reed/Shapiro, perhaps half of the known “editions” of this lithograph in all
continued
Degas was represented by one painting and two pastels in the Armory Show and
was hung in Gallery O alongside the works of his fellow Impressionists. New York
collector Alexander Morten loaned all three Degas works but did not offer them for
sale. One of the three, a pastel entitled
Le Repose
, is currently in the North Carolina
Museum of Art in Raleigh. Degas was an influential artist for the incoming and future
generation of artists, including Cassatt, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec (lots 46-55), Walter
Sickert (lots 134-136) and the Nabis (see Vuillard and Bonnard lots 56-65), and none
other than Picasso, who would later directly reference Degas in his painting
Standing
Nude
, from 1907 (Museo del Novecento, Milan).
Degas was, along with Pissarro, among the most prolific printmakers of the
Impressionist group, producing a considerable
oeuvre
of nearly 70 etchings, aquatints
and lithographs, many of these painstakingly worked through numerous states (see lot
29,
Au Louvre, la peinture, Mary Cassatt
, 1879-80, which is known in no fewer than 21
different states). Degas’ approach to printmaking was as experimental as the rest of
his art, and he constantly evolved in his pursuit to achieve fresh visual results. This
experimentation reaches its zenith in his bather lithographs of the early 1890s (lot 28),
a motif he had explored in lithography since the 1870s and which he seems to have
desired to make into a lithographic series toward the end of his career. Stogdon, in
his recent Degas catalogue, notes that the artist sought the expertise of the printer
Michel Manzi, “Who was especially conversant with photomechanical techniques,
then used a number of methods to initiate or at least propagate his images; the full
panoply included the transfer of monotypes, traditional lithographic transfer, the use
of photographic means and celluloid, crayon, tusche and scraper. The word ‘hybrid’
has been used here and elsewhere,” and is apt when referring to these late career
lithographs (
Edgar Degas, Catalogue XII
, 2006, catalogue number 16). These are
complex techniques that would push many contemporary printmaking facilities to
their limits today, no less a Parisian printmaking studio of the early 1890s, all the
while under the careful direction of the nearly 60-year-old Degas. In this respect,
Degas’ work perfectly anticipates the coming waves of experimentation and massive
change that shook the art world from the early 1900s, through the Armory Show and
into the 20th century.
