Woman Drying Her Arm 1885 - 1895

Curator: Edgar Degas' "Woman Drying Her Arm," likely created between 1885 and 1895, a pastel drawing we're fortunate to have here at The Met. Editor: My immediate reaction? A tender sketch of everyday vulnerability. The loose pastel strokes evoke a feeling of intimacy. It’s not idealized, it’s real. Curator: The roughness, the visible layers of pastel... Degas, as a consummate observer, found the beautiful within the quotidian acts. Consider also, he was very interested in labor--it gives her action an unusual dimension. Editor: Yes, and the materiality echoes the transience of the moment itself. Each stroke a breath, each layer a thought. It reminds me how physical even thinking about a human moment actually is. The cotton cloth held out to the drying arm speaks also to the production that makes everyday hygiene possible. Curator: Degas wasn’t interested in simply replicating visual reality; he was digging in it. His series depicting women at their toilette aren’t always straightforward or reverent depictions, are they? Editor: Certainly, and it begs the question about his labor—to make visible that labor behind making art-- that pastel dust doesn’t appear by magic! How Degas wrestled those marks of chalk onto that paper really gets at how Impressionism can capture a private universe within. I think of other domestic interiors by artists such as Mary Cassatt, and even the more theatrical scenes of Renoir and Manet and how much context of bourgeois intimacy they imply. Curator: Indeed! By inviting us into the implied backstage, Degas exposes the mechanics of being that are common to his subjects as well as the society around him. It's this sensitivity that makes his art feel timeless and perpetually immediate. Editor: A beautiful convergence, a captured instant of labor that gives voice to material as well as subject. That image makes me reconsider the daily labors in my own life.