Portraits By Degas

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1962. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived

Degas's major surviving photographs, little known even among devotees of the artist's paintings and pastels, are analyzed and reproduced for the first time in this volume, which accompanies an exhibition at The Metropolitan Muscum of Art, The J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Bibliotheque Nationale de France.

A sensuous, textured novel of life in a refugee camp, long-listed for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction On a hill overlooking a refugee camp in Sudan, a young man strings up bedsheets that, in an act of imaginative resilience, will serve as a screen in his silent cinema. From the cinema he can see all the comings and goings in the camp, especially those of two new arrivals: a girl named Saba, and her mute brother, Hagos. For these siblings, adapting to life in the camp is not easy. Saba mourns the future she lost when she was forced to abandon school, while Hagos, scorned for his inability to speak, must live vicariously through his sister. Both resist societal expectations by seeking to redefine love, sex, and gender roles in their lives, and when a businessman opens a shop and befriends Hagos, they cast off those pressures and make an unconventional choice. With this cast of complex, beautifully drawn characters, Sulaiman Addonia details the textures and rhythms of everyday life in a refugee camp, and questions what it means to be an individual when one has lost all that makes a home or a future. Intimate and subversive, Silence Is My Mother Tongue dissects the ways society wages war on women and explores the stories we must tell to survive in a broken, inhospitable environment.

Carefully reproduced from a rare 1923 limited edition, most of these magnificent drawings are unavailable elsewhere in published form. Dancers, nudes, portraits, travel scenes, and more. 100 drawings, including 8 in full color.

Edgar Degas seems never to have reconciled himself to the label of "Impressionist," preferring to call himself a "Realist" or "Independent." Nevertheless, he was one of the group’s founders, an organizer of its exhibitions, and one of its most important core members. Like the Impressionists, he sought to capture fleeting moments in the flow of modern life, yet he showed little interest in painting plain air landscapes, favoring scenes in theaters and cafes illuminated by artificial light, which he used to clarify the contours of his figures, adhering to his Academic training. He is especially identified with the subject of dance; more than half of his works depict dancers. He also was a superb draftsman, and particularly masterful in depicting movement, as can be seen in his interpretations of dancers and female nudes. His portraits are notable for their psychological complexity and for their portrayal of human isolation.

The nude figure was critical to the art of Edgar Degas throughout his life, and yet his expansive body of work on this subject has been overshadowed by his celebrated portraits and dancers. Degas and the Nude is the first book in a generation to explore the artist's treatment of the nude from his early years in the 1850s and 1860s, through his triumphs in the 1880s and 1890s, all the way to his last decades, when the theme dominated his artistic production in all media. With essays by leading critics, the book aims to provide a new interpretation of Degas's evolving conception of the nude and to situate it in the subject's broader context among his peers in 19th-century France. Among the scores of reproductions is one of the most important of Degas's early paintings, Scene of War in the Middle Ages, which exerted a lifelong influence on the artist's treatment of the female nude and includes poses poses repeated throughout his career. Also included are monotypes of the late 1870s, which illustrate Degas's most explicitly sexual depictions of women in Parisian brothels, and pictures portraying the daily life of women wherever they resided. Together these iterations range over more than a half-century of virtuoso achievement and manifest a groundbreaking look at the evolution of this master artist.