Bodily Waste

David Trotter

  • The Spectacular Body: Science, Method and Meaning in the Work of Degas by Anthea Callen
    Yale, 244 pp, £35.00, February 1995, ISBN 0 300 05443 2

No other 19th-century artist made quite such a spectacle of the female body as Edgar Degas. Over three-quarters of his output of paintings, drawings, pastels, prints and sculptures consists of images of women, sometimes seen in the company of men or children, but more often alone or with other women. The nude figure is the subject of about a fifth of that total, from the copies and life studies he made as a young man in the 1850s through the early history paintings to the naturalistic studies of the 1870s and 1880s and beyond.

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