HESCAH Lecture: The Air of Modernity: Edgar Degas’ Ironers Ecocritically

Join us for a HESCAH lecture by Dr. Marni Kessler, Professor of Nineteenth-Century European Art, Kress Foundation Department of Art History, University of Kansas

"The Air of Modernity: Edgar Degas’ Ironers Ecocritically"

In his over forty representations of ironers, Edgar Degas highlighted the difficulty of the women’s labors. He captured the effort required to smooth wrinkles, curve cuffs, and sharpen collars, and depicted the workers’ exhaustion, poignantly portraying some mid yawn and enervated. While considering these important aspects of Degas’s laundresses, this talk takes an ecocritical perspective that expands our understanding of them. Centering his surprising (and surprisingly vivid) evocation of the coal smoke emitted by the stoves that heated the irons, we come to see how Degas used richly layered pigments to foreground the unhealthy air that these women breathed, enabling us to encounter them, and the fullness of their humanity, anew.

Image credit: Edgar Degas. Repasseuses (Ironers). 1884 -1886. RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski.

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