Enduring Characteristics and Unstable Hues: Men in Black in French Painting in the 1860s and 1870s

Marcia Pointon ^[1]
1. [1] University of Manchester
  
  University of Manchester
  
  Reino Unido
Localización: Art history: journal of the Association of Art Historians, ISSN 0141-6790, Vol. 40, Nº. 4, 2017, págs. 744-769
Idioma: inglés
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Resumen
- This essay explores the relationships between the black (or near black) dress of men as depicted in late nineteenth-century French portraiture and the professional practices of tailoring and dyeing. Moving beyond issues of style and fashion it identifies semantic congruence between the material character of certain works on canvas and the technical processes of producing 'black' textile and turning it into clothing. Focusing on Edgar Degas (but discussing also work by Henri Fantin Latour, Carolus Duran and Edouard Manet) the author explains not only how the theories and practices of painting, dyeing and tailoring intersect and inform each other but also how artists creatively explored the defects -such as loss of colour, wrinkles and signs of wear- that evolving technologies in dyeing and tailoring sought to eradicate. In the black and white practice of photography, that Degas enthusiastically embraced towards the end of his life, was located the logical extensin to these proccupations. A medium as indexical as clothing itself, photographs could register the ways in which bodies imprinted into dress a unique material dimension that endured even as the body, like the black of its dress, faded.