Edgar Degas’s Dust

Abstract Powders of various kinds have played a distinctly important though long-overlooked role in the corpus of Edgar Degas (1834–1917). A close examination of the artist’s attitude towards different powdered materials uniquely illuminates the remarkable ways that he treated the relationship between the matter of art and the material composition of his depicted scenes. This essay shows that a persistent impulse to rethink representation in material terms, and to view the matter of art in light of its capacity to evoke the substance of the world around him, drove both how Degas made his pictures and his commitment to some of their most celebrated motifs.