Watch a video about the construction of a new tutu for The Met's cast of Degas's famous sculpture, The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer.

"So much about dance vocabulary has to do with line."

His sculpture remained a private medium, akin to sketches or drawings, in which Degas, limiting himself to a small range of subjects, explored the problems that fascinated him.

Join Stephan Wolohojian, John Pope-Hennessy Curator in Charge, and Ashley Dunn, Associate Curator, to virtually explore Manet/Degas.

"These days, Degas abandons himself entirely to his new passion for photography," wrote an artist friend in autumn 1895, the moment of the great Impressionist painter's most intense exploration of photography. Degas's major surviving photographs little known even among devotees of the artist's paintings and pastels, are insightfully analyzed and richly reproduced for the first time in this volume, which accompanies an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Bibliothéque Nationale de France. Degas's photographic figure studies, portraits of friends and family, and self-portraits—especially those in which lamp-lit figures emerge from darkness—are imbued with a Symbolist spirit evocative of realms more psychological than physical. Most were made in the evenings, when Degas transformed dinner parties into photographic soirees, requisitioning the living rooms of his friends, arranging oil lamps, and directing the poses of dinner guests enlisted as models. "He went back and forth ... running from one end of the room to the other with an expression of infinite happiness," wrote Daniel Halévy, the son of Degas's close friends Ludovic and Louise Halévy, describing one such evening. "At half-past eleven everybody left; Degas, surrounded by three laughing girls, carried his camera as proudly as a child carrying a rifle." Lively eyewitness accounts of Degas's photographic activity from the journals of Daniel Halévy and Julie Manet, as well as from Degas's own letters, are included in Malcolm Daniel's essay, "The Atmosphere of Lamps or Moonlight" which presents a fascinating account of Degas's brief but passionate embrace of photography. Daniel explores the psychological connection between events in the aging artist's life and his decision to take up the camera and demonstrates the aesthetic connections between Degas's photographs and his work in other media. Eugenia Parry's essay, "Edgar Degas's Photographic Theater," illuminates the fertile interplay between painting, posing, theatrical direction, and photography in Degas's work, and Theodore Reff, in "Degas Chez Tasset," sheds light on the hitherto barely known Guillaume Tasset and his daughter Delphine, from whom Degas sought photographic supplies, advice, and services. Finally, this volume includes a scholarly catalogue raisonné and census of prints, an essential tool for further study of Degas's photographs.

High School Intern Julia invites visitors to explore the Metropolitan's smaller exhibitions, which often allow for a quiet—and mostly private—experience of the objects.

Friends, rivals, and at times antagonists, Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas maintained a pictorial dialogue throughout their lives as they both worked to define the painting of modern urban life. Manet/Degas, the first book to consider their careers in parallel, investigates how their objectives overlapped, diverged, and shaped each other’s artistic choices. Enlivened by archival correspondence and records of firsthand accounts, essays by American and French scholars take a fresh look at the artists’ family relationships, literary friendships, and interconnected social and intellectual circles in Paris; explore their complex depictions of race and class; discuss their political views in the context of wars in France and the United States; compare their artistic practices; and examine how Degas built his personal collection of works by Manet after his friend’s premature death. An illustrated biographical chronology charts their intersecting lives and careers. This lavishly illustrated, in-depth study offers an opportunity to reevaluate some of the most canonical French artworks of the nineteenth century, including Manet’s Olympia, Degas’s The Absinthe Drinker, and other masterworks.

Degas, the catalogue of the first large-scale retrospective exhibition of the work of Edgar Degas (1834–1917) to be held in more than fifty years, is the permanent record of the 1988–89 exhibition jointly organized by the Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris, The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Comprehensive in scope and definitive in nature, this volume includes paintings, pastels, drawings, monotypes, prints, photographs, and sculpture representing every aspect of the career of one of the protean artists of the nineteenth century. As a result of extensive research conducted in libraries, archives, and private collections in Europe and North America, dozens of previously unpublished letters and hundreds of little-known documents here provide an unparalleled source of information on the life of this extraordinary artist, bringing to a new level of precision our understanding of his working methods, his subjects, and his patrons. In recent years, there has been a spate of publications devoted to the work of Degas. All of them have been defined either by the specific character of a particular collection, or by thematic or chronological divisions. The present volume, five years in the making, unites all the various facets of Degas's artistic personality and presents his oeuvre as a totality, rich in its variety, relentless in its experimentation, and constant in its commitment to the human figure portrayed within the context of modern urban life. The book is divided into four sections, each corresponding to a period in Degas's life: his work as a student in Rome until the 1872 trip to New Orleans; early maturity, 1873–81; mid-career, 1881–90; and late work, 1891–1912. Each section is introduced by a general essay and a detailed chronology that identifies the central issues and events—trips abroad, exhibitions, sales to dealers, contacts with other artists, and cultural outings—relevant to those years of the artist's life. Each of the 392 works in the exhibition is fully illustrated and discussed in individual entries that include a selected bibliography, a list of exhibitions, and a complete history of previous owners. The evolution, through exquisite preparatory drawings, of the artist's ambitious history paintings of the 1860s is fully documented. Great family portraits, such as the monumental Bellelli Family of the 1860s, are considered in relation to Degas's self-portraits and portraits of his colleagues Tissot, Cassatt, and Manet. Degas's lively depictions of racetrack scenes and jockeys are examined in works ranging from the 1860s to the early 1900s. His ballet pictures are studied with equal comprehensiveness, from his first treatment of the subject to such key paintings of the 1870s as the two versions of The Dance Class to the last brilliantly worked pastels. Each of the series of Degas's maturity—laundresses, milliners, brothel scenes, landscapes, and bathers—is documented with major works in oil or pastel and supplemented by related drawings, bronzes, monotypes, and prints. A special effort has been made to include works that are little known (for example, Degas's photographs), and an emphasis has been placed on works made early in the artist's career—largely in Italy—and late in his life, when he achieved in his bathers, coiffures, and dancers a powerful fusion of bold line and intense color.

Unusual vantage points and asymmetrical framing are a consistent theme throughout Degas’s works.