Fashion Illustration by Ruben Toledo for Details Magazine, August 1988,
" 7th Ave. Says Women Will Wear Nothing But Pants This Fall Season",
Pencil on paper
It is meat with bone: articulated, dynamic, forceful. My admiration for Degas' After The Bath is in what you notice is not only the voluptuouness and ease of the female flesh (the de-ossified, passive flesh of Degas' techer, Ingres) but also the spinal column. You will find at the very top of the spine that the spine almost comes out of the skin altogether. And this gives such a grip and twist that you're more conscious of the vulnerability of the rest of the body than if he had drawn the spine naturally up to the neck. He breaks it so that this thing seems to potrude from the flesh. In Degas Muscles(Dancers, Bathers, Horses and bourgeois Sitters) perhaps for the first time in the nineteenth century, have "origin and insertions;" Degas has almost a chiropractor's sense of how bones rotate in the sockets of the joint, how they become heavy or tense, how the body's centres of gravity are multiple and not just one, and how these centres form a dynamic constellation of points as they move through space ...
After The Bath, Woman Drying Herself(C.1888/92)Edgar Degas
I always hope to be able to make a great number of figures without a narrative. I don't want to avoid telling a story, but I want very, very much to avoid to do the thing Valéry said - to give the sensation without the boredom of its conveyance. And the moment the story enters the boredom comes up. The painter who was able to portray groups of people in a picture without falling into the boredom of narration, in my eyes, was Paul Cézanne.
Unidentified artist (‘M.G’) Fatal Effects of Gluttony: A Lord Mayor's Day Night Mare,
published by Thomas McLean 4 November 1830
Handcoloured lithograph Lent by the Guildhall Library, Corporation of London [tate.org.uk]
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