ABSTRACT
The focus is limited to Degas's monotypes, perhaps the most interesting and surely the most personal form of printmaking available to a painter—indeed, the form that most closely resembles the dynamics of painting itself. Degas was, from the beginning, the most gifted of the followers of Ingres—an artist mad about drawing, devoted to the line, to the Ingresque contour, and to the classicism that such a devotion entailed. His talents in this direction were the talents of genius, and he had the temperament, the culture, the social position, and the spiritual disposition to become a magnificent reactionary in the academic mode. Degas became, almost despite himself, first a realist and then something else, something wholly unexpected—a kind of Expressionist improvising a new canon of feeling out of his immersion in an art he adored and a world he despised.
