Shop art print and framed art Apres le bain by Edgar Degas

Woman Drying Her Neck is a pastel by the French painter Edgar Degas, painted in 1895-1898 and now in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. Part of Degas's vast body of pastels depicting female nudes, the painting shows a woman drying her neck after grooming. To accomplish this gesture, she adopts a body posture that, according to the aesthetic codification promoted by the Académie, would have been inappropriate for a nude. For the fullest enjoyment of the work, in any case, it is essential to have recourse to the commentary that the Symbolist scholar Joris-Karl Huysmans gave on Degas's nudes: Huysmans, in fact, gives a masterly description of the ambivalence with which Degas related to the nude : As the critic Giovanna Rocchi has noted, "on the one hand there is a pitiless eye that denudes the miseries of the human body, on the other the refined touch of the artist of genius, who glorifies the misery of the flesh with the beauty of interpretation". Musée d'Orsay - Official [...]

 

This artwork is a drawing from the modern period. It belongs to the impressionism style.

 

« Apres le bain » is kept at J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, USA.

 

Find the full description of Apres le bain by Edgar Degas on Wikipedia.