The Spectacular Body: Science Method and Meaning in the Work of Degas

About this book

The Spectacular Body explores the ways in which the human bodyespecially the female bodywas visualized by artists in late nineteenth-century Paris. Focusing on the work of Degas it deals with issues of sexuality gender and visual representation to illuminate the underlying meanings of the famed Impressionists depictions of women in his series of bathers dancers and prostitutes. Engaging in feminist polemic Anthea Callen investigates why at this particular time the female figure became such a highly charged icon for masculine projections of fascination with and revulsion over the body. She explains how the gender politics of Degas culture made it inevitable that he represent masculine desireand anxieties about masculine identity evoked by such desirethrough an apparently detached masculine scrutiny of the female body. Callen shows how Degas pictorial stance was structurally unresolved caught between a controlling distanced quasi-scientific observation on the one hand and a disruptive and more unmediated more psychically loaded engagement with the body on the other. Locating Degas art within his own historical era she discusses how socio-scientific ideas of health and disease hygiene and dirt prostitution criminality sexuality class race and other issues were played out in his work. Using visual analysis as a deconstructive tool she discusses Degas choice of medium composition spatial organization pose color and light and shade showing that his technical unorthodoxy combined with scientific discourse in his art to make his work a paradigm of artistic and urban modernity.