Degas & Cassatt: A Solitary Dance

Collaborations among avant-garde artists have always captured the imagination of art enthusiasts and scholars. Such partnerships have inspired creativity and innovation in style, perspective, and materials. Salva Rubio and artist Efa focuses on the decades-long friendship between Edgar Degas and Mary Cassatt, icons of the Impressionist movement. Degas, an artist who strongly critiqued the art establishment in Paris, has often held unorthodox views. Only a handful of his contemporaries could stand to be around him.

Arrogant and self-assured, it is a wonder that he fancied Cassatt, an American artist, who shared similar aesthetic sensibilities. Degas & Cassatt: A Solitary Dance details the precarious partnership between the two artists, who pursued their own visions while also colluding on shared aspirations to change the status quo in the 19th-century Parisian bourgeoisie.

While the friendship between the two artists has been documented in books and even featured in museum exhibitions, Rubio and Efa bring it to light in graphic novel format. Efa simulates the unique brush strokes of the famed artists in each frame, capturing the essence of Degas’ creative approach. Readers will come away with a refreshed understanding of how Degas and Cassatt led a group of iconoclasts who dreamed of novel ways to invite people from different backgrounds to engage in art.