There's a wonderful description
of Degas by his friend Pissarro,
and Pissarro
was very active politically.
He describes Degas
in a letter to his son.
He says, "Degas
is an anarchist, but in art."
Degas was introduced to the monotype
in the mid­ 1870s by his friend,
the artist and printmaker
Ludovic Lepic,
and they make
Degas' first monotype together.
And for Degas the process
is always the most interesting.
Go into the print studio
and see what comes out of it.
A monotype is a hybrid
of drawing and printmaking.
The artist would draw on a plate,
the plate would be sandwiched
with a piece of paper
and run through a press.
It goes through the press once
and then the image is pulled
off onto the sheet of paper.
There’s always a kind of
wonderment of how it looks
and I think sometimes
one would be incredibly happy
and sometimes probably the opposite.
The monotypes have been
divided into two types:
the dark field
and one called the light field.
And dark field is when Degas
would lay a curtain
of black ink on the plate.
It is reported that he used a dauber,
a piece of felt
which has been rolled up and tied
so it looks a little sausage.
And then draws by removing the ink.
And so in those works,
you get the sense of an image
emerging out of darkness.
He would use his own hands,
he might use a piece of fabric
to get a certain kind of texture,
or a sponge, the back of a brush,
anything that he had
around the studios.
The light field is,
essentially, the opposite.
You start with
a totally unmarked plate
and then you add ink
but you would add it
with a brush or with a rag.
If you’re using a cotton paper,
the fibers of the paper
need to soften up
in order to accept the ink better.
So the dampening of the paper
loosens the fibers up
so that all of the image can then
come up from the plate’s surface.
You get the sense that Degas
falls in love with this process,
that he really goes crazy for it.
Even one of his friends
has this description of Degas
saying that he's no longer a man,
he's a plate.
When we think of a monotype,
even when you hear the word,
it's “mono” - it’s one.
But Degas used it
to create multiple impressions,
and what he would get
is a kind of ghost image,
a degraded image
of the first impression.
And he uses pastels sometimes
to enhance the image, to define it.
He’s very experimental,
especially in the landscape monotypes.
And he’s using oil paint
instead of printer’s ink
which is not typical.
He lets the press kind of smoosh it,
and you get this kind of
smooshed field of color.
One of the inspirations
for him making the work
is seeing the landscape
through the door of a moving train.
How do you express something
that you experience
as you move through it?
Monotype encouraged that freedom,
encouraged a kind of looseness.
The way you can
smudge the image in monotype
allows him to capture
the hustle and bustle of the city.
Faces that Degas
might have passed by,
he’ll just smudge them out.
Working strongly
against the conventions
that he learned as a young artist.
No matter how much
you work onto the plate,
how long it takes you,
each time you print it,
when you pull it off,
you just basically have to live
with what you got.
That’s the beauty of it.
It was the process that was important,
there was never a final picture.
It was about endlessness,
always the possibility
of another image to be made.
