Ocular Anxiety and the Pink Tea Cup:
Edgar Degas’ Woman with a Bandaged Eye
10:00 a.m., Friday, Nov. 10, 2006
Webster Hall Auditorium
Admission free

Dr. Marni Kessler analyzed Degas’ Woman with a Bandage of 1872-3 particularly as it relates to the artist’s own failing eyesight, his internal conflicts surrounding it, his relationship with his blind American sister-in-law, and the cultural trajectory of ophthalmologic practices and eye disease during the second half of the 19th century. By the mid 1860s, Degas began experiencing blurred vision especially in his left eye. A visit to an ophthalmologist confirmed his worst fears. Told he would eventually go blind (which he did not), he panicked and became depressed. Kessler argued that it is here, in this image of a woman with a white bandage over her left eye, that Degas visualizes his ocular anxiety.

Dr. Marni Kessler is an assistant professor of 19th Century European Art in the Kress Foundation Department of Art History at the University of Kansas. She received her Ph.D. from Yale University. Her forthcoming book Sheer Presence: The Veil in Manet’s Paris (University of Minnesota Press, 2006) links the phenomenon of the veil to modernist art practice, medical theories, French imperialism in North Africa, and architectural conditions in late 19th century Paris. She has published articles in Art Bulletin, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, and Woman’s Art Journal and has forthcoming essays in Picturing Power: The New York Chamber of Commerce, Portraiture, and its Uses.