Nude Woman Standing, Drying Herself
Edgar Degas French
Not on view
Degas’s preoccupation with bathers as a subject extended into the 1890s. He treated this motif, of a woman seen from behind bending to dry her side, in a variety of media and made it the focus of his last series of six lithographs. Beginning with a monotype transferred to a lithographic stone, he worked across the series in a manner that has still not been completely deciphered. It involved transfer papers and photographic transfers in addition to direct work on the stone matrices, “advancing by endless recapitulation,” as described by the poet Paul Valéry.