Tuesday 11 October 2011

Oh To Be in Boston....

Brisbane to Boston.... the attraction of walking the streets that Robert B Parker, Dennis Lehane and Jeremiah Healy inhabit has always been tempting, but of late there are other reasons for me wishing I was in Boston right now. 


The Boston Museum of Fine Art currently has (by all accounts) a wonderful exhibition of Degas Nudes on for the next few months. Edgar Degas is best known for his paintings of horse races and ballerinas in rehearsal, but from the 1870s until about 10 years before his death in 1917, Degas knocked out some of the greatest nudes in the history of Impressionism and Western art. Only the media changed - charcoal, pastel, paint, monotype, lithograph, clay - but the consistency of image remained constant. Degas stripped away centuries of idealisation and to a degree, sentimentality, revealling the female form as it was in his lifetime. From all accounts, Boston's MFA exhibition has gathered some of the best American Degas nudes and French works together and also mixes other contemporaries alongside to help offer comparisons and break the image flow. The images are at times unsettling as well with some of the images depicting brothel workers and lesbian sex alongside some of the more well-known and admired Degas work's showing women at bathtime and drying themselves in mise-en-scene paintings. Oh... to be in Boston...











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