Brushing the surface: Edgar Degas’s La Coiffure as site of experimentation and corporal dissolution
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis examines how the repetition of forms and figures in Edgar Degas's artworks presents the representation of the female body as a foundation for Degas's experimentation with different media.Through an analysis of Degas's 1896 painting La Coiffure and three negative photographic plates, unique for their colouristic effects caused by developmental error, I explore Degas's interest in media-specific effect, particularly his heightened interest in photography between 1895 and 1896.In the first half of this thesis, I link Degas's chosen subject matter of hair brushing to his artistic production and argue that both are material processes that elicit the tension between touch and sight.I also examine hair as a visual signifier of difference within nineteenth-century French culture.The second section of this thesis outlines the visual similarities between the glass negatives and La Coiffure to argue that Degas references the visual qualities of the plates in paint.From this analysis, Degas's use of photography as a modern technology that encouraged his longstanding practice of repetition is explored.To conclude, I connect the process of dry-plate development to Degas's artmaking and nineteenth-century ideals of hair care.I ultimately argue that both the photographic plates and La Coiffure exist as sites for Degas's artistic experimentation.This connection reveals how the body of the model, exhibited in the negatives, dissolves through Degas's artistic process.My research aims to provide a critical approach to Degas's La Coiffure and to contribute to alternative feminist interpretations of his images of women.This thesis was made possible by the support of my supervisor, Dr. Mary Hunter, whose guidance, invaluable insight and feedback was imperative
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it