When Degas makes prints, “plate and man are flattened together by his printing press, its mechanism having swallowed him completely"

This lecture will shed new light on Degas’s heterogeneous printmaking practice and his fascination with its materials, techniques, and tools. These pictures offer important insight into the artist’s persistent efforts to expand the conventional limits of pictorial illusionism, his frequent intertwining of motif and making, and the central but little-understood role of technical and material experimentation in his larger corpus.