![1908 (ca.), Edgar Degas, Woman Drying Her Hair [pastel] -- Norton Simon Museum (Pasadena) | by R.M.Lenox](http://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54223669219_53ce1f5e52.jpg)
1908 (ca.), Edgar Degas, Woman Drying Her Hair [pastel] -- Norton Simon Museum (Pasadena)
From the museum label: Degas's late pastels of bathers drying and combing their hair are among the most sensuous—and the most bewilderingly abstract—works he ever produced. After half a century's assiduous study (making copies of Renaissance and modern masters in his youth, producing countless life drawings of professional models, ballet dancers and prostitutes in his maturity), Degas had come to know the contours of the nude by heart. Here those contours are engulfed by a thicket of terse, scribbling strokes, layer after layer of color, applied with an electric swiftness. These strokes lend vitality to the body they describe but also insist on the artist's own dynamic process and on the flatness of the picture's surface.
1908 (ca.), Edgar Degas, Woman Drying Her Hair [pastel] -- Norton Simon Museum (Pasadena)
From the museum label: Degas's late pastels of bathers drying and combing their hair are among the most sensuous—and the most bewilderingly abstract—works he ever produced. After half a century's assiduous study (making copies of Renaissance and modern masters in his youth, producing countless life drawings of professional models, ballet dancers and prostitutes in his maturity), Degas had come to know the contours of the nude by heart. Here those contours are engulfed by a thicket of terse, scribbling strokes, layer after layer of color, applied with an electric swiftness. These strokes lend vitality to the body they describe but also insist on the artist's own dynamic process and on the flatness of the picture's surface.