Jeff Nagy

There are many myths about Edgar Degas--from Degas the misanthrope to Degas the deviant to Degas the obsessive. But there is no single text that better stokes the fire than Degas and His Model, a short memoir by Alice Michel, who purportedly modeled for Degas. Never before translated into English, the text's original publication in Mercure de France in 1919, shortly after the artist's death, has been treated as an important account of the master sculptor at work. We know that Alice was writing under a pseudonym, but who the real person behind this account was remains a mystery. Yet the descriptions seem too accurate, the anecdotes too spot-on to discount; even the dialogue captures the artist's tone and mannerisms. What is found in these pages is at times a woman's flirtatious recollection of a bizarre "artistic type" and at others a moving attempt to connect with a great, often tragic man. The descriptions are limpid; the dialogue is lively and intimate, not unlike reading the very best kind of gossip, with world-historical significance.

Lebensztejn is one of France’s best - kept secrets. A world - class art historian who has lectured and taught at major universities in the United States, his work has remained almost entirely in French, his American audience limited to a sma ll but dedicated group of cognoscenti. First introducing the Manneken Pis ? the iconic little boy whose stream of urine supplies water to this famous fountain and is also the logo for a Belgian beer company ? the author takes the reader through a semi - scatological maze of cultural history. The earliest example is a fresco scene loc ated directly above Cimabue’s Crucifixion from around 1280 at the Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi, in which Lebensztejn’s careful eye locates an angel behind a pillar urinating through a hole in his garment. He continues to navigate expertly through cu ltural twists and turns, stopping to discuss Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1968 film Teorema , for example, and Marlene Dumas’s 1996 – 1997 homage to Rembrandt’s pissing woman. At every moment, Lebensztejn’s prose is lively, his thinking dynamic, and his subject matt er entertaining. In this short and poignant cultural history, readers will not only find the care for detail that has made Lebensztejn into one of the greatest European art historians, but also the rebelliousness that makes him one of the most interesting intellectuals of our time.