Michelle Foa: Edgar Degas and the Matter of Cotton

Michelle Foa's article "In Transit: Edgar Degas and the Matter of Cotton, between New World and Old," was just published in the September 2020 issue of The Art Bulletin. Edgar Degas’ four-month stay in New Orleans in 1872-73, which marked his first experience crossing the Atlantic, resulted in two remarkable paintings of a cotton office. Foa’s article analyzes the important connections between Southern cotton, the textiles that fill the artist’s pictures of dancers, laundresses and bathers, and the paper he used for many of his drawings. 

This year she has given lectures at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (virtually) and Wofford College. In July she joined the Board of Directors of the National Committee for the History of Art.