Lot Essay
Since 1880, pastel had become Degas' favourite medium especially for his depictions of nudes. Pastel allowed him to combine colour and drawing and gave a lot of flexibility to his technique. As opposed to oil, which offers a smooth and firm surface, the more tactile the nature of pastel makes it the ideal medium to suggest the skin of a nude woman.
"At the Eighth Independent Exhibition of 1886, Degas....showed a group of pastels that he describes in the catalogue as being of women 'bathing, sponging, drying, combing and being combed'. It takes an effort of imagination to grasp what these pictures of bathers can have looked like when they first appeared. The camera has made us so familiar with images of people who do not know they are being watched that many of the disturbing overtures of Degas' pastels have vanished...Degas' bathers went behind the public aspect of a woman as it was habitually maintained in social behaviour or art. His bather did not project a style of femininity, nor was his treatment of them tinted by sentimentality or idealisation or prurience." (R. Gordon and A. Forge, Degas, New York, 1988, p. 223).
Degas never ceased to paint nude women, insisting more and more on the spontaneity and the naturalness of his models' poses. Showing those works several times in different exhibitions he seems to wish to present himself as "Le renovateur du genre traditionnel et le createur du nu moderne face à l'eclectisme usé du salon et au manque d'initiative des naturalistes indépendants." (R. Thomson, Les Nus, Nathan, p. 134)
"At the Eighth Independent Exhibition of 1886, Degas....showed a group of pastels that he describes in the catalogue as being of women 'bathing, sponging, drying, combing and being combed'. It takes an effort of imagination to grasp what these pictures of bathers can have looked like when they first appeared. The camera has made us so familiar with images of people who do not know they are being watched that many of the disturbing overtures of Degas' pastels have vanished...Degas' bathers went behind the public aspect of a woman as it was habitually maintained in social behaviour or art. His bather did not project a style of femininity, nor was his treatment of them tinted by sentimentality or idealisation or prurience." (R. Gordon and A. Forge, Degas, New York, 1988, p. 223).
Degas never ceased to paint nude women, insisting more and more on the spontaneity and the naturalness of his models' poses. Showing those works several times in different exhibitions he seems to wish to present himself as "Le renovateur du genre traditionnel et le createur du nu moderne face à l'eclectisme usé du salon et au manque d'initiative des naturalistes indépendants." (R. Thomson, Les Nus, Nathan, p. 134)