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Thanksgiving Proclamation ~1863

Creation of a Holiday. Lincoln’s proclamation to the nation creating Thanksgiving as a holiday as respite for a nation at war. Eloquent. Somber. Reflective. Source: The Smoky Hill and Republic Union, 1863. More Fun Discoveries from Antique Cookbooks Roast Turkey ~1875 Food Saving Tips ~1819 Friday Menu ~1910

November 16, 20180

Roast Turkey ~1875

Roasting Turkey. Seven more days until turkey time! This roast turkey recipe is surprisingly detailed. You crush the point of the breast-bone with a rolling pint, serve with curled sausage, and cranberries. I might try rubbing my turkey in an onion. Fun read. Source: In the Kitchen, 1875. More Fun Discoveries from Antique Cookbooks Inseparable…Continue Reading →

November 15, 20181

Golden Sunshine Cake ~1914

The Girl turns 16 today. Wow! How did that happen? Cake time! I thought I had purchased a gluten free cake mix, but discovered that it was, in fact, a pizza mix lurking in the corner of the pantry. Oops. Plan B was to make a golden sunshine cake that we had made before that…Continue Reading →

November 14, 20186

Carving ~1875

How to Carve a Turkey Time to ramp up the Thanksgiving holiday cooking-theme. I always thought it was an interesting dichotomy growing up: The Matriarch did the roasting. The Patriarch did the carving. Here was see the gender divide as well. Today? Well, if you’re going to fry it in peanut oil, then I’m fine…Continue Reading →

November 13, 20183

Coffee Monday Yuban WWI ~1917

WWI Yuban Coffee Advertisement. To all who celebrate Armistice Day or Veterans Day. “There is no shortage of coffee. You may drink as much as you are accustomed to – You will not deprive the soldiers or the women and children abroad of their share.” Great find! Happy Monday! More Fun Discoveries American Domestic Cookery…Continue Reading →

November 12, 20182

Don’t Waste Bread ~1916

Le Pain. Translation: Our duty is not to waste bread. From a group of posters designed by school children and others, some marked “Affiche composée par les enfants de France pour la prévoyance et les économies.” Celebrating the 100th anniversary to the end of WWI. To honor the event, I am sharing several posters under…Continue Reading →

November 11, 20182

Save Bread~1919

Eat Potatoes. From a group of posters designed by school children. As someone who is deathly allergic to bread, these children largely reflect how I feel in the kitchen… The 100th anniversary of the end of WWI is coming up. To honor the event, I’ll be sharing several posters under the category: ‘Economic and Industrial…Continue Reading →

November 10, 20183

Save Bread~1916

Eat Potatoes. From a group of posters designed by school children. As someone who is deathly allergic to bread, I approve! The 100th anniversary of the end of WWI is coming up. To honor the event, I’ll be sharing several posters under the category: ‘Economic and Industrial Aspects’. Source: Library of Congress More Fun Discoveries…Continue Reading →

November 9, 20180

Wanted: 500 Bakers ~1917

Also 100 Cooks. Alas, ‘baker’ is no longer a job classification in the military. I’m sure there were several good jokes about the bakery company! The 100th anniversary of the end of WWI is coming up. To honor the event, I’ll be sharing several posters under the category: ‘Economic and Industrial Aspects’. Source: Library of…Continue Reading →

November 8, 20181

WWI Bread Poster ~1917

Help Win the War. The 100th anniversary of the end of WWI is coming up. To honor the event, I’ll be sharing several posters under the category: ‘Economic and Industrial Aspects’. Source: Library of Congress More Fun Discoveries from Antique Cookbooks Election Cake ~1875 Pickles ~1819 Grape Harvest ~2018

November 7, 20182

Election Cake ~1875

Election Cake Recipe. Election day here in the US. Time to get your bake on. This recipe is quite involved. Makes 9 loves – plenty to share at the polls! (Find out about measurements here.) In 1875, Ulysses S. Grant was the President of the US; he helped lead the Union to victory over the…Continue Reading →

November 6, 20189

Coffee Monday Maxwell House 1926

The Coffee of Southern Bells. Happy Monday! More Fun Discoveries from Antique Cookbooks A Pickle Recipe for Elzerena 1877 Black Bean Soup 1924 Perfect Lunch Menu

November 5, 20183

Packing Lunches ~1920

The Lunchbox. The art of packing lunches has been foremost in my mind recently. Our local recycling company just announced that it would no longer accept plastic bags or plastic wrap of any sort. Now this has been some time coming. California already outlawed cheap plastic grocery bags (Yes, we also banned straws…evil straws.). Stores…Continue Reading →

November 3, 201810

Friday Menu ~1920

Happy Friday. This is my kind of menu! Just watched Julie & Julia for the umpteenth time. One of my favorites. Fitting to have the Red Star Cooking School advertisement for today’s post. More Fun Discoveries from Antique Cookbooks Pigeon Season ~1800 Summer Dining ~1897 Currant Wine ~1929

November 2, 20184

Halloween Menu ~1943

Colorful Halloween Menu. Happy Halloween, everyone! Here’s a fascinating Halloween menu from WWII – its purpose was to be festive and improve morale. The chef deliberately chooses foods with fall colors. Notice the mention of rationing and food shortages. Read more about this menu’s preparation here. Source: The Evening Star, 1943. More Fun Discoveries from…Continue Reading →

October 31, 20182

Frivolous Halloween Follies ~1914

Ideas for Halloween. Decorations. Halloween Party Games. If you have some extra time, check out the source link below. Fun Halloween-themed newspaper edition on all things Halloween. You definitely get the idea that these parties were for young couples! The games are really creative. Would have been tremendous fun. Source: Evening Ledger, 1914. More Fun…Continue Reading →

October 30, 20183

Coffee Monday: Five Steps to a More Enjoyable Life ~1935

Happy Monday! More Fun Discoveries from Antique Cookbooks How To Set The Luncheon Table ~1899 Feeling Saucy ~1819 Strawberry Season! 1920

October 29, 20184

Halloween Menu ~1922

National League Cookbook. Happy Halloween! Can you just imagine the roaring 20s and a fantastic costume party dinner? Prohibition probably meant that Cider had a little kick to it! Lots of Halloween parties this weekend ~enjoy! Source: Everywoman’s Cook Book, 1922. More Fun Discoveries from Antique Cookbooks On Pumpkins ~1885 La Ditta R. Petra Wine Co….Continue Reading →

October 27, 20186

6 Simple Dinner Menus ~1922

National League Cookbook. Item No.1 in Menu No.1 is Jellied Chicken Boullion – Simple? Not so sure. Hearty? Yes. Source: Everywoman’s Cook Book, 1922. More Fun Discoveries from Antique Cookbooks Helps for Housekeepers ~1922 12 Sandwich Recipes ~1897 Chili Meat 1938

October 26, 20182

Happy Greasy Food Day ~1875

Doughnut Recipes. Happy National Greasy Food Day! I could have brought you fried eggplant or fried eggs, but opted instead for some doughnuts. Something we can all appreciate with our morning coffee. Time to go grab a dozen for the office on the way to work! A slightly more involved version from Mrs. Boyd. Source:…Continue Reading →

October 25, 20184

Keeping Cider Sweet ~1875

Preserving Cider. Are we all busy making cider, yet? We have two tubs of apples waiting to be processes – will get to it soon. I was hoping to find a cider recipe, but only found two for preservation. Very surprised at the mustard seed in the first. And for the second, let’s just say…Continue Reading →

October 24, 201810

3 Simple Luncheon Menus ~1922

National League Cookbook. At what point did we move away from such delectables as Mushroom and Noodle Timbale and Prune Whip and substitute them for Subway? Source: Everywoman’s Cook Book, 1922. More Fun Discoveries from Antique Cookbooks Lightning Tea Cakes ~1917 Eggs ~1855 Not to Blame ~1891

October 23, 20183

Coffee Monday ~1914

Yuban Advertisement 1914 Happy Monday! More Fun Discoveries from Antique Cookbooks Coffee Monday: Malt Coffee 1905 Common Sense Papers on Cookery Overview L’Eau de la Vie Recipe 1837

October 22, 20180

Mother’s Pumpkin Pie ~1875

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nofomoartworld · 7 years

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Hyperallergic: The Blindness of Edgar Degas

Edgar Degas, “Self-Portrait” (c. 1857–58), oil on paper, mounted on canvas, 10 1/4 x 7 1/2 inches, The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

David Zwirner Books has published two more entries into its ekphrasis series, which is dedicated to retrieving odd and forgotten texts from the dustbin of art history: the critic-proof Pissing Figures 1280-2014 by Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, a collection of short essays on, broadly speaking, depictions of urination in Western art, and Degas and His Model by the pseudonymous Alice Michel.

This is the only extent manuscript penned by Michel, a two-part memoir published in February 1919 in the bimonthly Symbolist literary gazette Mercure de France, which she wrote in the third person from the point of view of a model known only as Pauline.

There are three models named Pauline documented in Degas’ notebooks, as the translator Jeff Nagy writes in an introduction titled “A Model’s Agency,” but there is no way of knowing whether any of them posed for the artist during the period recounted in the memoir, when he was 76 years old, his eyesight failing. It is believed that the author could have been the model herself, or a third party relating the model’s story.

Nagy subscribes to the latter, and goes a bit further by advancing the idea, first raised by the art historian Heather Dawkins, that Michel was a secondary pseudonym for the singly named, pseudonymous Rachilde, “the pioneering decadent novelist,” as Nagy calls her, who in real life was Marguerite Vallette-Eymery, the cofounder and editor, with her husband, Alfred Vallette, of the Mercure de France.

Nagy justifies his opinion by asserting that Rachilde, given her status as a woman “occupying a significant position in an overwhelmingly male industry […] would likely have been sensitive to issues of women’s labor. Perhaps just as importantly, she had the institutional power to see that such an extremely unusual document found its way into print.”

The labor issues addressed in the book are presented in unsparing detail: the dark, cold, filthy studio; the muscle-wrenching poses; the stingy wages; the sometimes brutal treatment; the artist’s mood swings and hair-trigger temper. Pauline puts up with it because Degas offered steady work in an uncertain profession, but she also evinces a real, if conflicted, fondness for the old buzzard, and genuine pity over his encroaching blindness.

Pauline, who poses for Degas after he gave up painting and devoted himself to sculpture, appreciates his importance to French art even as a younger generation of painters, fixated on salons and honors, has all but forgotten him. He was the first artist to hire her, despite her shyness — an improbable drawback for a nude model, which is left unexplained. There is a queasy-making flashback to Degas watching her reluctantly undress so that he could judge whether she was “shapely enough to pose,” followed by an account of the artist punching her repeatedly in the small of the back to force her into the position he wanted.

After years of almost daily contact — Degas never took a day off, not Sundays or even Christmas — the artist seems to gain a grudging respect for his model, while she takes as much control of their relationship as she can, seeing through his bluster and strategizing over what she could say to him to lighten his mood or gain the upper hand in a dispute over working conditions.

Degas and His Model, for a short book (just 58 pages), is rich in incident and secondary characters, such as the artist’s long-suffering housekeeper, Zoé, and Pauline’s gossipy fellow models, Juliette and Suzon, as well as a hapless admirer of the artist who decided to pay an unannounced visit to the studio one morning, which he quickly learned was the wrong place at the wrong time.

Michel, through the viewpoint of Pauline, relates that Degas hated his first name and loved to sing Italian arias; hated the smell of flowers and perfume but loved the odor of burning bread; hated the sight of makeup on young women but loved the artificiality of the theater and ballet.

He reserved his deepest hatred, however, for Jews. Twenty-seven pages in, almost out of nowhere, he erupts into a shocking anti-Semitic tirade that all but capsizes the narrative: “I detest them, those Jews!” he rages. “An abominable race that ought to be shut up in ghettos. Or even totally eradicated!”

Almost as shocking, and perhaps creepier, is a scene that finds Zoé “reading aloud from an article in Libre parole” — a nationalist and anti-Semitic newspaper, as an endnote informs us — while the artist ate his breakfast. “Degas listened with an attentive expression, nodding slightly here and there to signal his agreement with the author.” This anecdote demonstrates that Degas’ bigotry was not a subterranean toxin that would break through the surface from time to time, like a fit of insanity, but a grievance he nursed and cultivated.

The overall monstrousness of his behavior as described in this memoir might be, to an art historical apologist, chalked up to the crankiness of old age. But a decades-long adhesion to a virulent belief system, which led him to cut off his Jewish friends in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair, is unredeemed by the sublimity he achieved in his art.

As we belatedly come to recognize that social progress is halting at best, and it becomes harder to flatter ourselves on our own enlightenment, it also becomes harder to relegate Degas’ inhumanity to an artifact of a time when racism and bigotry of all kinds were more acceptable. His cruelty becomes, instead, an indelible component of his artistry.

This is admittedly precarious territory, but I believe it can be argued that the obdurate politics of the two most prominent anti-Dreyfusards in the history of modern art, Degas and Paul Cézanne, played a role in the coldness infusing their relationship to the human form.

Cézanne famously rendered his sitters, most notably his wife, Marie-Hortense Fiquet, with the same dispassion he would apply to a bowl of fruit, setting off generations of painters and sculptors in search of pure form. But his gaze also turned people into objects of research, whose interest lay primarily in the formal possibilities they presented to the artist’s imagination.

Degas’ portraits can be breathtakingly beautiful, but they are also reserved and distant. The sitters avoid eye contact with the viewer (as a stand-in for the artist), and when they do, as in his self-portrait from 1857-58 in the collection of the Clark Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, they look wary and world-weary. In the majority of his signature depictions of dancers and bathers, the model’s face is turned away or obscured. This was very likely done for formal reasons — to direct the viewer’s gaze toward the entire composition, rather than zero in on the face — but it also reduces the subject’s personality to her pose — which was frequently torturous, as Pauline attests — and body type. The artist’s insistence on strenuous positions resulted in muscularly expressive imagery, but it also displayed a not-so-mild sadistic streak.

In contrast to their academic contemporaries, whose cloying and superficial paintings quickly achieved institutional recognition and market success, Degas and Cézanne were unable to cloak their ugliness in glazes and varnish: their conflict is our conflict; their inhumanity is our inhumanity. It was their inadvertent honesty that made them modern.

And the modernism they ignited quickly raced away from them. The dramatic spine running through Degas and His Model is the artist’s inability to complete Pauline’s sculpture — a second version of “Dancer Looking at the Sole of Her Right Foot” (1910-11) — after endless hours of posing. The practice of calibrated accuracy between model and image, which Degas dragged like an albatross from the glory days of the French Academy into the chaos of World War I, had been ambushed decades earlier by the Impressionists, with Pablo Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” (1907) delivering the coup de grâce.

As Nagy writes in his introduction, “perhaps the most cutting feature of Michel’s portrait is that ‘old Father Degas’ is artistically impotent. He can finish nothing, and statuettes that represent years of work over hundreds of sessions crumble to dust before his eyes, to be begun again, and again, in a cycle broken only by his death. Instead of a prolific visionary, Michel’s Degas more resembles a Beckett character retrofitted for Third Republic melodrama.”

The Beckett reference is particularly apt: every afternoon, dressed in rags because he refused to spend money on clothes, Degas would shamble alone around the streets of Paris until twilight force him back inside. But every morning he would get up, eat breakfast, brusquely greet his model, and engage once again, nearly blind and stewing with resentment, in the solitary, pointless, and fruitless pursuit of beauty — a 20th-century figure despite himself.

Degas and His Model (2017) is published by David Zwirner Books and is available from Amazon and other online booksellers.

The post The Blindness of Edgar Degas appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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