Degas: A Passion for Perfection
- Submitting institution
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University of Cambridge
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 12971
- Type
- M - Exhibition
- Venue(s)
- Fitzwilliam Museum
- Open access status
- -
- Month of first exhibition
- -
- Year of first exhibition
- 2017
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
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-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
1
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- "Degas: A Passion for Perfection is lead output in this multi-component item, which includes the exhibition book alongside contextual information enabling the reviewer to visualise the exhibition. The exhibition was curated by Munro, who also contributed five essays to and edited the accompanying book. There were four external collaborators. The exhibition was shown at the Fitzwilliam Museum in 2017 before transferring to Denver Art Museum.
The project involved systematic, in-depth art historical, technical and curatorial research into the Fitzwilliam’s Degas collection, the most extensive and representative in the UK. Munro’s overarching vision for the project was to demonstrate Degas’s ceaseless technical experimentation across a remarkably wide range of works - paintings, pastels, drawings, watercolours, prints of different types, counterproofs and sculptures in bronze and wax, and required close and analytical visual analysis of these works in different media. This project notably involved in-depth technical analyses of the Museum’s painting, Au Café, and its original wax models of dancers, research published in the book. Additional loans were drawn from internationally significant collections in Europe and the USA.
Thematically arranged, the exhibition and book began by studying Degas’s relationship to his artistic predecessors and the exhibition concluded with a group of works by twentieth-century artists who drew on Degas’ example. Munro’s explored Degas’s copies of the Old Masters, his treatment of the nude female figure, and his distinctive approach to landscape painting. The catalogue’s in-focus study of Au Café examined the painting afresh through the lenses of conversation and causerie, a social skill in which Degas himself excelled. An opening section examined the significance of the posthumous sale of Degas’s collection, in particular the works acquired by Cambridge economist John Maynard Keynes."
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -