Art

Degas: A new vision (National Gallery of Victoria)

by Grazia Gunn •

ABR Arts • 25 July 2016

Art

Degas: A new vision (National Gallery of Victoria)

by Grazia Gunn •

ABR Arts • 25 July 2016

Degas: A new vision is an exhibition of 206 works selected and presented by Henri Loyrette, the distinguished Degas scholar, former director of the Musée d'Orsay and subsequently director of the Musée du Louvre. In its range and variety the exhibition confirms the verdict of the writer and critic Edmond de Goncourt, expressed in 1872, that Degas was the man who, of all his contemporaries, best captured 'the soul of modern life'. Visitors to the exhibition who know Degas best as a painter of graceful ballet scenes will find those works illuminated – and their sense of Degas's versatility much extended – by the wider social context in which these famous dancers here are placed. 'Little rats', Balzac had called these underpaid, underfed nymphs of the ballet, who often eked out their meagre earnings through prostitution: a view the present exhibition may help us understand.

Grazia Gunn

Grazia Gunn is a Melbourne-based historian, art curator and critic. She taught Modernism in the Department of History of Art at the University of Cambridge from 1995 to 2003. A former Director of the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne (1989–91), she was curator in the department of International Art at the National Gallery of Australia (1981–89), curator of the Monash collection (1975–79), and curator at the Melbourne University Gallery (1971–73). She was project officer, International and Australian Touring exhibitions, Visual Arts Board, Australia Council (1974–75). At the 1988 Venice Biennale she was commissioner and curator for the Australian Pavilion. She has published extensively on contemporary art in Australia and overseas, and is the author of Arthur Boyd: Seven Persistent Images (1985). Her current project is The Modernization of Egypt and the Dynamics of Cultural exchange 1798–1882.