ABSTRACT

This article identifies a group of paintings by Edgar Degas as “bureau pictures,” representations of workplaces, creative or commercial, in which piles of paper are spread on desks. Through his depiction of paper, as well as his affective casting of the way in which human figures relate to their piles of paper, Degas explores the intertwined gestures of creative and bureaucratic labor. Paper’s tendency to offer a medium for fragmentation was represented in contemporary literature by Théophile Gautier and Émile Zola. In these texts and in Degas’s images, papery fragmentation takes two forms: either as a creative scattering symptomatic of an anti-classical aesthetic informed by Romanticism, or as an instrument of bureaucracy and administration, as in Zola’s representation of the stock market and the department store. Ultimately, in the bureau pictures, Degas does not take a definitive stance, but rather dwells on the way in which the two approaches intermingle, such that it is impossible to distinguish clearly between an artist’s or an author’s work and that of a clerk, at least at the level of the gestures and the handling of pieces of paper. In a move typical of Modernist aesthetics, however, paint and compositional choices strike back in order to submerge paper in the user’s coin (corner), as a “true fragment” impressed with the mark of artistic temperament.

摘要

本文将埃德加·德加斯（Edgar Degas）的一组绘画定为“局肖像”，代表创意或商业工作场所，其中成堆的纸张散落在桌子上。通过对纸的描绘以及对人物与纸堆的关系的情感投射，德加斯探索了创造性劳动与官僚劳动的相互交织的姿态。ThéophileGautier和ÉmileZola代表了当代文学中提供纸张碎片化倾向的趋势。在这些文本和Degas的图像中，纸质碎片的形式有两种：要么作为浪漫主义所倡导的反古典美学的创造性散布症状，要么作为佐拉代表股票市场和部门的官僚主义和行政手段。店铺。最终，在局的照片中，Degas并没有采取明确的立场，而是停留在两种方法相互融合的方式上，因此，至少在至少一个方面，不可能清楚地区分艺术家或作者的作品与文员的作品。手势的水平和纸片的处理。然而，在现代主义美学的典型行动中，涂料和成分的选择反击了，以将纸张浸没在用户的硬币（角），作为带有艺术气质标记的“真实片段”。