Danielle Canter [photo credit: Norton Simon Museum]
On Saturday, August 29, Danielle Canter, assistant curator in the Department of Drawings at the J. Paul Getty Museum, will spend an hour in the Norton Simon Museum’s theater on what Degas made by that method. The talk will draw on the museum’s own Degas monotypes, according to Norton Simon.
The lecture runs from 5:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. and is free with museum admission.
Getting a seat works differently depending on who you are. Advance registration is open to members, and walk-up tickets for all visitors are released at 4:00 p.m. on the day of the program, according to the museum. Doors open 30 minutes before the start. Advance ticket-holders check in at the Membership Desk between 12:00 p.m. and 4:45 p.m.; seating is not assigned, and guests who are not in their seats by 4:50 p.m. may forfeit their tickets.
Degas encountered monotype — an unusual printmaking method producing a single impression — in the 1870s, according to Norton Simon, which describes the medium as one that let him work across ink, paint and pastel at once.
More than 100 works by Degas belong to the museum at 411 West Colorado Boulevard, a group the Norton Simon describes as the second-largest assembled by a single collector, after the Havemeyer collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Its monotypes include “Squall in the Mountains,” dated 1890, worked in oil colors on cream-colored wove paper, and “Autumn Landscape (L’Estérel),” from the same year. “Woman Drying Herself after the Bath,” from 1876 to 1877, is pastel over monotype and is listed as on view. The Museum of Modern Art borrowed “Squall in the Mountains” in 2016 for its exhibition “Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty.”
Canter has an exhibition running at the Getty Center now. “Odilon Redon: Otherworldly Visions,” which she curated, closes October 18. Redon “used his art to offer new interpretations of the familiar,” Canter said in a Getty statement announcing that exhibition.
Degas trained under a disciple of Ingres and revered him, though the two met only once. The advice the older painter gave the student, Norton Simon recounts, was this: “Draw lines, young man. Many lines.” Decades later, in the color monotypes the museum keeps in Pasadena, the line was gone.
NEED TO KNOW
The Artist at Play: Degas and Monotype, a lecture by Danielle Canter, assistant curator in the Department of Drawings at the J. Paul Getty Museum, takes place Saturday, August 29, from 5:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. in the theater at the Norton Simon Museum, 411 West Colorado Boulevard, Pasadena, California 91105. The lecture is free with museum admission, which is $20 for adults, $15 for seniors 62 and older, and free for visitors 18 and under, students with valid identification and museum members. Members may register in advance; walk-up tickets for all visitors are released at 4:00 p.m. on the day of the program, and everyone must be seated by 4:50 p.m. Parking is free in the museum’s lot, with accessible spaces on both levels and limited free parking on adjacent streets. Pasadena Transit lines 10 and 33 and Metro bus line 180 stop in front, and the nearest Metro A Line station is Memorial Park, at 125 East Holly Street. For more, call (626) 449-6840 or visit the museum’s event page.
