After a Bath. Woman Drying the Back of her Neck.

After a Bath. Woman Drying the Back of her Neck, a pastel from 1895 at the Musée d'Orsay, belongs to Degas's late and most fully developed series of bathing women. By the mid-1890s his eyesight was severely compromised, yet he continued to produce these intimate studies with astonishing physicality, working from memory, earlier drawings, and sculptural models. The subject — a woman's arched back as she reaches to dry her neck — isolates a specific, unseen, and ordinarily private movement with the same attention Degas gave to the arabesque of a trained ballerina. The late pastels treat the female body as pure form, stripped of narrative, social context, or anecdote.

The pastel is built from dense, overlaid strokes in Degas's late manner — warm oranges and pinks for the lit surfaces of the back, cooler blues and purples in the shadows and in the towel or drapery. The directional marks follow the body's rounded forms, reinforcing three-dimensionality. His focus on the dorsal view removes any element of facial expression or social performance — the painting becomes a study in the sculptural qualities of the human back in motion.