Odd Man Out

Carol Armstrong offers an important study of Edgar Degas's work and reputation. Armstrong grapples with contradictory portrayals of Degas as "odd man out" within the modernist canon: he was a realist whom realists rejected, a storyteller in pictures who did not satisfy novelist-critics, a painter of modern life who was not a modernist, a member of the impressionist group who was no impressionist. Armstrong confronts these and other paradoxes by analysing the critical vocabularies used to describe Degas's work. By reading several groups of the artist's images through the lens of a sequence of critical texts, Armstrong shows how our critical and popular expectations of Degas are overturned and subverted.