Summary: Collaborations in Modern and Postmodern Visual Arts | Roberta Crisci-Richardson In art-historical literature, French nineteenth-century painters Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas are often singled out as high bourgeois, close in class belonging and urbanity. However, it is evident that they were two very different kinds of bourgeois. While Manet wanted and could afford to fight alone his heroic struggle for success, promoting himself as a solitary genius, or “temperament,” as Zola called it, it is often forgotten that almost all his life Degas was a bohemian who worked within the Parisian rebellious culture of solidarity and mutual support among artists: not only during the 1860s, when he had to portray friends for free in order to build up a reputation as a painter, but above all in the years until 1886, when Degas was one of the chief organizers of the independent exhibitions held since 1874 by the Impressionists on the boulevard des Italiens. In this paper, I will explore the implications of Degas’s engagement both in the activity of the Impressionist societies and in the collaborative printmaking practiced by Degas, Camille Pissarro, Ludovic Lepic, Félix Bracquemond and Mary Cassatt as a tool of their self-fashioning as Northern painters-printmakers in the seditious Montmartre of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Roberta Crisci-Richardson completed her PhD degree in the history of art at the University of Melbourne. Her thesis is titled “Mapping Degas. Real Spaces, Symbolic Spaces and Invented Spaces in the Life and Work of Edgar Degas (1834-1917)”. She is currently writing on Edgar Degas's view of marriage and how this intersects with the painter's avant-gardism.
