Edgar Degas Drawings and pastels

In this modestly scaled, lavishly illustrated book, Lloyd (formerly, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford) aims to narrate Degas's life and stylistic evolution through his drawings and pastels. To that end, Lloyd underscores the extent to which Degas practiced drawing--which differentiates him from most Impressionist colleagues--and subverted its traditional subservience to painting. Beyond using numerous notebooks carried on his person, Degas made thousands of drawings and pastels, often as independent artworks that he exhibited, sold, or mined in aesthetic experimentation. Lloyd beautifully articulates how Degas, searching for new effects, adopted diverse materials or techniques, combined existing ones in novel ways, or added strips of paper to accommodate the organic growth of his ideas. Although the book advances chronologically, it weaves persistent threads from the role of the human figure and the study of art of the past in Degas's creative process yet acknowledges his changing approaches to portraiture, history painting, and landscape. Lloyd also shows how Degas's peers found inspiration in his work on paper. This book may serve well as a narrative enhancement to Paul Andre Lemoisne's Degas et son oeuvre (1946-49), Theodore Reff's Degas: The Artist's Mind (1976), and Jean Boggs and Anne Maheux's Degas Pastels (CH, Jan'93, 30-2469). Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through researchers/faculty; general readers. A. Luxenberg University of Georgia

Drawing, the author argues, is what sets -Edgar Degas (1834-1917) apart from his impressionist colleagues. Lloyd (formerly with the Ashmolean Museum, Univ. of Oxford) examines his subject's career chronologically but focuses on works on paper in pencil, chalk, charcoal, gouache, and pastel rather than on the major paintings. This focus highlights the less-famous parts of Degas's oeuvre, such as the history paintings and landscapes. Despite its relatively small size, this title is filled with hundreds of full-color illustrations, reproducing both well-known and other studies and finished drawings from collections around the world. The narrative traces familiar biographical paths and is suitable for college-level scholars and beyond. Lloyd's writing style is both dry and occasionally prone to generalizations, such as "Nothing is ever what it seems in a work by this artist and the same might be said of his personality." Advanced researchers may find such conclusions lacking in originality, but the book provides a solid overview of Degas's modernity grounded in traditional draftsmanship. VERDICT Scholars have extensively studied Degas's drawings, but this book contributes an accessible, richly illustrated introduction to the subject.-Lindsay King, Yale Univ. Libs, New Haven, CT (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.