Degas, danse, dessin

In 1937, Valéry published a set of reflections on Degas with Éditions Vollard, in a luxurious edition of 325 copies, illustrated with twenty-six engraved reproductions after Degas’s graphic work. The text alone was reissued the following year in this Gallimard edition.

The book blends thought and memory, deceptively fragmentary and casual in tone, a project going back more than thirty years and already perceptible in Monsieur Teste and Vinci. For Valéry, Degas was unquestionably a man of taste who, though born in the full flush of Romanticism and obliged, as he matured, “to associate with the Naturalist movement, to frequent Duranty, Zola, Goncourt, Duret… and to exhibit with the first Impressionists,” remained at heart, even to the point of “ferocity,” a classicist.

“Caught between the commandments of Monsieur Ingres and the strange charms of Delacroix, the art of his time resolved to exploit the spectacle of modern life. It ruined the notion of subject, reducing within a few years the whole intellectual dimension of art to a few debates on the substance and color of shadows (…) Such is the problem for Degas, who is ignorant of nothing, enjoys everything, and therefore suffers from everything.”

From the library of André Maurois (bookplate).