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Edgar Degas

 
Art Encyclopedia: (Hilaire Germain) Edgar Degas
 

(b Paris, 19 July 1834; d Paris, 27 Sept 1917). French painter, draughtsman, printmaker, sculptor, pastellist, photographer and collector. He was a founder-member of the Impressionist group and the leader within it of the Realist tendency. He organized several of the group's exhibitions, but after 1886 he showed his works very rarely and largely withdrew from the Parisian art world. As he was sufficiently wealthy, he was not constricted by the need to sell his work, and even his late pieces retain a vigour and a power to shock that is lacking in the contemporary productions of his Impressionist colleagues.

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Biography: Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas
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The French painter and sculptor Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas (1834-1917) is classed with the impressionists because of his concentration on scenes of contemporary life and his desire to capture the transitory moment, but he surpassed them in compositional sense.

Edgar Degas was born on July 19, 1834, in Paris, the son of a well-to-do banker. From an early age Edgar loved books, especially the classics, and was a serious student in high school. His father hoped his son would study law, but Edgar enrolled at the école des Beaux-Arts in 1855, where he studied under Louis Lamothe, a pupil of J. A. D. Ingres. Degas always valued his early classical training and had a great and enduring admiration for Ingres, a painter with a decisively linear orientation.

In 1856 Degas went to Naples, where his sister lived, and eventually he settled in Rome for 3 years. He admired the Early Christian and medieval masterpieces of Italy, as well as the frescoes, panel paintings, and drawings of the Renaissance masters, many of which he copied. Back in Paris in 1861, he executed a few history paintings (then regarded as the highest branch of painting). Among these was the Daughter of Jephthah (1861), which is based on a melodramatic episode from the Old Testament. He copied the works of the old masters in the Louvre, a practice he kept up for many years.

From 1862 until 1870 Degas painted portraits of his friends and family. In 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War, he served in the artillery of the national guard. Two years later he went to New Orleans to visit members of his family, who were in the cotton business. Between 1873 and 1883 Degas produced many of his paintings and pastels of the racecourse, music hall, café, and ballet. He had no financial problems, and even prior to the 1870s he had established his reputation as a painter. Degas stopped exhibiting at the respected Salon in 1874 and displayed his works with those of the less well-established impressionists until 1886. Although he was associated with the impressionists, his preoccupation with draftsmanship and composition was not characteristic of the group.

Beginning in the mid-1870s Degas suffered from failing eyesight. From the 1890s on he became increasingly miserly and more and more of a recluse. In the last years of his life he was almost totally blind and wandered aimlessly through the Parisian streets. He died on Sept. 27, 1917, in Paris.

His Portraiture

Portraiture was more important for Degas than for any of the other impressionists. Some of his portraits are among the best produced in Western art since the Renaissance, and many reveal his profound understanding of human nature. In the Belleli Family (1859), a group portrait executed in Naples of his aunt, her husband, and their two daughters, Degas caught the divisions within a family. Belleli's emotional separation from his wife is suggested by his pose and by his physical isolation within the room, as he sits cramped at a fireplace, with his back to the viewer. One of the daughters repeats the triangular form of her mother, who shields her, while the other, shown in a more unstable pose, seems to be divided in her loyalties. Among Degas's other portraits are the very soft Head of a Young Woman (1867), Diego Martelli (1879), and Estelle Musson (1872-1873), the blind wife of Degas's brother René, in which the silver and rose tones bring into relief the remote tenderness of the sitter.

Depiction of the Modern Scene

By 1870 Degas had abandoned his desire to become a history painter, and he drew his characters instead from the contemporary Parisian scene. While the bourgeois fashionable world of the ballet, theater, and racetrack interested him considerably, he sometimes depicted squalid scenes of dissipation, as in Absinthe (1876). Degas was especially attracted by the spectacle of the ballet with its elegance of costume and scenery, its movement which was at once spontaneous and restrained, its artificial lighting, and its unusual viewpoints. Usually he depicted the ballerinas off guard, showing them backstage at an awkward moment as they fasten a slipper or droop exhausted after a difficult practice session. He seems to have tried deliberately to strip his dancers of their glamour, to show them without artifice.

On the surface Degas, operating in this candid-camera fashion, fits easily within the confines of impressionism as an art of immediacy and spontaneity. But these scenes of contemporary Parisian life are not at all haphazardly composed: the placement of each detail is calculated in terms of every other to establish balances which are remarkably clever and subtle and which are frequently grasped by the viewer only after considerable study. In Dancers Practicing at the Bar (1877) the perspective of the floorboards is so adjusted and the angle of vision so calculated that a resin shaker at the left of the canvas is able to balance in interest and compositional force the two dancers almost completely to the right of center.

Degas conceived of the human figure as operating within an environmental context, to be manipulated as a prop according to the dictates of greater compositional interest. Eccentricities of poses and cuttings of the figures, which were inspired to a degree by Japanese prints, do not occur accidently in his paintings. In A Carriage at the Races (1873) the figure in the carriage to the left is cut nearly down the middle. Had Degas shown more of this figure, an obvious and uninteresting symmetry would have been set up with the larger carriage in the right foreground.

Degas's Techniques

In copying the Old Masters, Degas sometimes attempted to uncover their techniques. For example, when he copied Andrea Mantegna and some of the Venetians, Degas tried to simulate the Venetian method of building up the canvas with layers of cool and warm tones by a series of glazes. From the mid-1870s he worked increasingly in pastel; and in his last years, when his sight was failing, he abandoned oil completely in favor of pastel, which he handled more broadly and with greater freedom than before.

Pastel, for the most part an 18th-century medium, helped Degas produced qualities of airiness and lightness, as in the Ballerina and Lady with Fan (1885). However, Degas would endlessly experiment with unusual techniques. He would sometimes mix his pastel so heavily with liquid fixative that it became amalgamated into a sort of paste. He would do a drawing in charcoal and use layers of pastel to cover part of this. He would combine pastels and oil in a single work. He would even pass through a press a heavily pigmented charcoal drawing in order to transfer the excess of pigment onto a new sheet so as to make an inverse proof of the original. In his monotypes he used etching in a new way: he inked the unetched plate and drew with a brush in this layer of ink; then he removed all the ink in places to obtain strong contrasts of light and dark or painterly effects in this printing medium. Thus, in a variety of ways Degas succeeded in obtaining a richness of surface effects.

Bronze Sculptures

After 1866 Degas executed bronze statues of horses and dancers, up to 3 or 4 feet high, which complemented his interest in these subjects in his paintings. His bronze and painted wax figures of dancers, like the Little Dancer of Fourteen Years (1880-1881), are often clothed in real costumes, an innovation that gives them a remarkable immediacy. In the statues of dancers, Degas catches the figures in a transitory moment, as they are about to change position. As in the paintings, Degas strips the dancers of glamour and sometimes reveals them as scrawny adolescents. The surfaces of Degas's bronzes are not smooth but retain the rich articulations of the wax and thereby complement the expressive surfaces of the impressionist painting.

Further Reading

Jean Sutherland Boggs, Portraits by Degas (1962), is the definitive work on Degas and is thoroughly documented. John Rewald, Degas: Works in Sculpture (1944), shows a little-known aspect of Degas and contains 112 plates. Lillian Browse, Degas Dancers (1949), contains a fair text and over 150 good black-and-white illustrations of Degas's ballet dancers done in pastel, oil, and sculpture. Daniel Catton Rich, Edgar Hilaire Germain Degas (1951), glosses over Degas's debt to the art before him.

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Hilaire-Germain- Edgar Degas
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(born July 19, 1834, Paris, France — died Sept. 27, 1917, Paris) French painter, graphic artist, and sculptor. The son of a wealthy banker, he entered the École des Beaux-Arts in 1855. He spent much time in Italy studying and copying the Old Masters and became a skilled draftsman, producing history paintings and portraits. In the 1860s he was introduced to Impressionism by Édouard Manet and gave up his academic aspirations, turning for his subject matter to the fast-moving city life of Paris, particularly the ballet, theatre, circus, racetrack, and cafés. Influenced by Japanese prints and the new medium of photography, he used displaced figure groupings and unfamiliar perspective to create figure groups seen informally and in movement, similar in effect to snapshots. His fascination with the ballet and the racetrack sprang from his interest in picturing people absorbed in the practiced movements of their occupations. He often worked in pastel, his favourite medium, producing series of women, bathers, ballerinas, and horse races. From c. 1880 he modeled wax figures, which were cast in bronze after his death. He was the first of the Impressionists to achieve recognition.

For more information on Hilaire-Germain- Edgar Degas, visit Britannica.com.

 
Photography Encyclopedia: Edgar Degas
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Degas, Edgar (1834-1917), French painter and amateur photographer. Only a small and untypical fraction of Degas's photographs—c.60 prints made over a brief period (1895-6)—are known today. He was familiar with and used photography as early as his training years, when he made numerous copies of Italian old masters from photographs. The notebooks he kept throughout his life are filled with photographers' addresses, and he is known to have briefly frequented Nadar at the end of the 1860s. But it was not until the mid-1890s, when amateur photography was in full swing, that he began taking pictures himself. For two years he had a veritable passion for the medium just as, at other periods, he was addicted to poetry or making monotypes.

His choice of subject was unfashionable. He favoured distinctly posed interior portraits, and cared little about the quality of prints, which he entrusted to a local photographer. He used artificial light to photograph friends such as Renoir, Verhaeren, and the Mallarmé and Halévy families, and made numerous self-portraits. These chiaroscuro images, made in the evening after dinner, have an intimate, sentimental quality at a time when the artist, ageing and nearly blind, often reflected on the death of friends and the difficulty of completing his work. Photography offered relaxation for his tired eyes and a means of examining and fixing the faces of those he loved.

There also survive fragments of a larger, lost oeuvre, some landscapes, female nudes, and dancers, more closely linked to his paintings and demonstrating his masterly sense of composition and movement. While Degas was always extremely critical of his paintings, he was proud of and amused by his photographs, though he steadfastly refused to exhibit them.

— Sylvie Aubenas

Bibliography

  • Terrasse, A., Degas et la photographie (1983).
  • Daniel, M., Parry, E., and Reff, T., Edgar Degas photographe (1999)
 
Dictionary of Dance: Edgar Hilaire Germain Degas
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Degas, Edgar Hilaire Germain (b Paris, 19 July 1834, d Paris, 26 Sept. 1917). French painter. He drew, painted, and modelled many studies of dancers which focused on real rather than idealized qualities, for example their peculiar musculature and their attitudes of exhaustion as well as of beauty. He also exaggerated more abstract compositional elements such as the play of light and shade over their bodies. These studies have inspired several ballets including Ashton's Foyer de la danse (1932) and Lifar's Entre deux rondes (1940).

 

Degas, Edgar (1834-1917). One of the most important painters of the Impressionist movement, Degas devoted himself to the representation of modern life to which he brought innovative pictorial strategies (such as cropped borders and unusual angles of vision) and unrelenting experimentation with materials and techniques. Unlike Monet he was not interested in the plein-air study of nature, preferring the urban subjects (girls training for ballet, laundresses, cabaret and circus performers, prostitutes) also prominent in the novels of Zola, Huysmans, and the Goncourts, and in whom is enacted the complex relationship between representation and sexuality in Third-Republic France. Despite Valéry's belief that Degas could have been a major poet, his sonnets are more remembered for having provoked Mallarmé's famous advice to him: ‘My dear Degas, it is not with ideas that one writes poetry. It is with words.’

— James Kearns

 
Spotlight: Edgar Degas
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From our Archives: Today's Highlights, July 19, 2005

French painter and sculptor Edgar Degas was born on this date in 1834. Known for his fluid paintings of ballerinas and racehorses, Degas began to experience problems with his eyes in the early 1870s. Within ten years, he shifted his artistic endeavors to sculpture and pastels, which did not demand such acute eyesight. By 1908 he was no longer able to sculpt or paint, and he wandered the streets of Paris. When he died in 1917, Degas left behind some 2,000 paintings and 150 sculptures.
 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Edgar Degas
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Degas, Edgar (Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas) (ēlĕr' zhĕrmăN' ĕdgär' dəgä'), 1834–1917, French painter and sculptor, b. Paris; son of a banker. Although prepared for the law, he abandoned it for painting, studying at the École des Beaux-Arts with L. Lamothe, a student of Ingres, and in Italy, copying 15th- and 16th-century masters. He was precociously gifted as a draftsman and a brilliantly subtle and penetrating portraitist (e.g., Bellelli Family, 1859; Louvre). He exhibited for six years in the Salon (1865–70), but later ceased showing there and exhibited with the impressionists, whose works he admired although his approach often differed from theirs. An unflagging perfectionist, Degas strove to unite the discipline of classical art with the immediacy of impressionism. Trained in the linear tradition of Ingres, Degas shared with the impressionists their directness of expression and the interest in and portrayal of contemporary life. His favorite subjects were ballet dancers, women at their toilette, café life, and race-track scenes. He made notes and sketches from living models in motion to preserve informality of action and position. From these he organized his finished work in the studio, not directly from nature as his contemporaries did. Moreover, he created many daring compositional innovations. Influenced by Japanese prints and especially by photography, Degas diverged from the traditional ideas of balanced arrangements. He introduced what appeared to be accidental cutoff views, off-center subjects, and unusual angles, all quite carefully planned. Sometimes he effected a remarkable balance by giving special weight to the focus of interest, as in Woman with Chrysanthemums (1865; Metropolitan Mus.) and Foyer of the Dance (1872; Louvre). Gradually, Degas turned away from the medium of oil painting, perhaps because of his failing eyesight. He produced more freely executed, glowing pastels and charcoal drawings. His works in sculpture include many notable studies of dancers and horses. A number of his paintings and sculptures may be seen in the Metropolitan Museum. Many of his most celebrated works, including Absinthe, The Rehearsal, and Two Laundresses (1882) are in the Louvre. Ranked among the greatest of French artists, Degas profoundly influenced such later artists as Toulouse-Lautrec and Picasso.

Bibliography

See his letters ed. by M. Guérin (tr. 1947); catalogs of his works by J. Rewald (sculpture, 1944), L. Browse (dancers, 1949), D. Cooper (pastels, 1954), J. S. Boggs (portraits, 1962, and drawings, 1966), and E. P. Janis (monotypes, 1968); studies by A. Vollard (tr. 1927), D. C. Rich (1951), D. Halévy (tr. 1964, repr. 1971), and C. Armstrong (1991). See also J. Adhémor and F. Cochin, Degas. The Complete Etchings, Lithographs, and Monotypes (1975); J. DeVonyar and R. Kendall, Degas and the Dance (2002).

 
Fine Arts Dictionary: Degas, Edgar
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(day-gah, duh-gah)

A nineteenth-century French painter and sculptor. Among his preferred subjects were ballet dancers and scenes of café life.

 
Quotes By: Edgar Degas
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Quotes:

"What a delightful thing is the conversation of specialists! One understands absolutely nothing and it's charming."

"Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things."

 
Wikipedia: Edgar Degas
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Edgar Degas

Self-portrait (Degas au porte-fusain), 1855
Birth name Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas
Born 19 July 1834(1834-07-19)
Paris, France
Died 27 September 1917 (aged 83)
Paris, France
Nationality French
Field Painting, Sculpture, Drawing
Movement Impressionism
Works The Belleli Family (1858-1867)
Woman with Chrysanthemums (1865)
Chanteuse de Café (c.1878)
At the Milliner's (1882)
Influenced Walter Sickert

Edgar Degas (19 July 1834 – 27 September 1917), born Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas (French pronunciation: [ilɛʀ ʒɛʁmɛ̃ ɛdɡɑʀ dœˈɡɑ]), was a French artist famous for his work in painting, sculpture, printmaking and drawing. He is regarded as one of the founders of Impressionism although he rejected the term, and preferred to be called a realist.[1] A superb draughtsman, he is especially identified with the subject of the dance, and over half his works depict dancers. These display his mastery in the depiction of movement, as do his racecourse subjects and female nudes. His portraits are considered to be among the finest in the history of art.

Early in his career, his ambition was to be a history painter, a calling for which he was well prepared by his rigorous academic training and close study of classic art. In his early thirties he changed course, and by bringing the traditional methods of a history painter to bear on contemporary subject matter, he became a classical painter of modern life.[2]

Contents

Biography

Early life

Degas was born in Paris, France, the eldest of five children of Célestine Musson De Gas and Augustin De Gas, a banker. The family was moderately wealthy. His mother died when Degas was thirteen, after which his father and grandfather were the main influences on his early life. At age eleven, Degas (in adulthood he abandoned the more pretentious spelling of the family name)[3] began his schooling with enrollment in the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, graduating in 1853 with a baccalauréat in literature.

Degas began to paint early in his life. By eighteen he had turned a room in his home into an artist's studio, and in 1853 he registered as a copyist in the Louvre. His father, however, expected him to go to law school. Degas duly registered at the Faculty of Law of the University of Paris in November 1853, but made little effort at his studies there. In 1855, Degas met Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, whom he revered, and whose advice he never forgot: "Draw lines, young man, and still more lines, both from life and from memory, and you will become a good artist."[4] In April of that same year, Degas received admission to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where he studied drawing with Louis Lamothe, under whose guidance he flourished, following the style of Ingres.[5] In July 1856, Degas traveled to Italy, where he would remain for the next three years. In 1858, while staying with his aunt's family in Naples, he made the first studies for his early masterpiece, The Bellelli Family. He also drew and painted copies after Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, and other artists of the Renaissance, often selecting from an altarpiece an individual head which he treated as a portrait.[6] By 1860 Degas had made more than seven hundred[citation needed] copies of works including Italian Renaissance and French Classical art.

Artistic career

Upon his return to France in 1859, Degas moved into a Paris studio large enough to permit him to begin painting The Bellelli Family—an imposing canvas he intended for exhibition in the Salon, although it remained unfinished until 1867. He also began work on several history paintings: Alexander and Bucephalus and The Daughter of Jephthah in 1859–60; Sémiramis Building Babylon in 1860; and Young Spartans around 1860.[7] In 1861, Degas visited his childhood friend Paul Valpinçon in Normandy, and made the earliest of his many studies of horses. He exhibited at the Salon for the first time in 1865, when the jury accepted his painting Scene of War in the Middle Ages, which attracted little attention.[8] Although he exhibited annually in the Salon during the next five years, he submitted no more history paintings, and his Steeplechase—The Fallen Jockey (Salon of 1866) signaled his growing commitment to contemporary subject matter. The change in his art was influenced primarily by the example of Édouard Manet, whom Degas had met in 1864 (while both were copying the same Velázquez portrait in the Louvre, according to a story that may be apocryphal).[9]

At the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, Degas enlisted in the National Guard, where his defense of Paris left him little time for painting. During rifle training his eyesight was found to be defective, and for the rest of his life his eye problems were a constant worry to him.[10]

After the war, in 1872, Degas began an extended stay in New Orleans, Louisiana, where his brother René and a number of other relatives lived. Staying in a house on Esplanade Avenue, Degas produced a number of works, many depicting family members. One of Degas' New Orleans works, depicting a scene at The Cotton Exchange at New Orleans, garnered favorable attention back in France, and was his only work purchased by a museum (that of Pau) during his lifetime.

Degas returned to Paris in 1873. The following year his father died, and in the subsequent settling of the estate it was discovered that Degas' brother René had amassed enormous business debts. To preserve the family name, Degas was forced to sell his house and a collection of art he had inherited. Dependent for the first time in his life on sales of his artwork for income, he produced much of his greatest work during the decade beginning in 1874.[11] By now thoroughly disenchanted with the Salon, Degas joined forces with a group of young artists who were intent upon organizing an independent exhibiting society. The first of their exhibitions, which were quickly dubbed Impressionist Exhibitions, was in 1874. The Impressionists subsequently held seven additional shows, the last in 1886. Degas took a leading role in organizing the exhibitions, and showed his work in all but one of them, despite his persistent conflicts with others in the group. He had little in common with Monet and the other landscape painters, whom he mocked for painting outdoors. Conservative in his social attitudes, he abhorred the scandal created by the exhibitions, as well as the publicity and advertising that his colleagues sought.[1] He bitterly rejected the label Impressionist that the press had created and popularized, and his insistence on including non-Impressionist artists such as Jean-Louis Forain and Jean-François Raffaëlli in their exhibitions created rancor within the group, contributing to their eventual disbanding in 1886.[12]

As his financial situation improved through sales of his own work, he was able to indulge his passion for collecting works by artists he admired—old masters such as El Greco and such contemporaries as Manet, Pissarro, Cézanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh. Three artists he idolized, Ingres, Delacroix, and Daumier, were especially well represented in his collection.[13]

In the late 1880s, Degas also developed a passion for photography.[14] He photographed many of his friends, often by lamplight, as in his double portrait of Renoir and Mallarmê. Other photographs, depicting dancers and nudes, were used for reference in some of Degas' drawings and paintings.[15]

As the years passed, Degas became isolated, due in part to his belief that a painter could have no personal life.[16] The Dreyfus Affair controversy brought his anti-Semitic leanings to the fore and he broke with all his Jewish friends.[17] His argumentative nature was deplored by Renoir, who said of him: "What a creature he was, that Degas! All his friends had to leave him; I was one of the last to go, but even I couldn't stay till the end."[18]

While he is known to have been working in pastel as late as the end of 1907, and is believed to have continued making sculpture as late as 1910, he apparently ceased working in 1912, when the impending demolition of his longtime residence on the rue Victor Massé forced a wrenching move to quarters on the boulevard de Clichy.[19] He never married and spent the last years of his life, nearly blind, restlessly wandering the streets of Paris[20] before dying in 1917.

Artistic style

The Dance Class (La Classe de Danse),1873–1876, oil on canvas, by Edgar Degas

Degas is often identified as an Impressionist, an understandable but insufficient description. Impressionism originated in the 1860s and 1870s and grew, in part, from the realism of such painters as Courbet and Corot. The Impressionists painted the realities of the world around them using bright, "dazzling" colors, concentrating primarily on the effects of light, and hoping to infuse their scenes with immediacy.

Technically, Degas differs from the Impressionists in that he "never adopted the Impressionist color fleck",[21] and he continually belittled their practice of painting en plein air.[22] "He was often as anti-impressionist as the critics who reviewed the shows", according to art historian Carol Armstrong; as Degas himself explained, "no art was ever less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and of the study of the great masters; of inspiration, spontaneity, temperament, I know nothing."[23] Nonetheless, he is described more accurately as an Impressionist than as a member of any other movement. His scenes of Parisian life, his off-center compositions, his experiments with color and form, and his friendship with several key Impressionist artists—most notably Mary Cassatt and Edouard Manet—all relate him intimately to the Impressionist movement.[24]

Degas' style reflects his deep respect for the old masters (he was an enthusiastic copyist well into middle age)[25] and his great admiration for Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres and Eugène Delacroix. He was also a collector of Japanese prints, whose compositional principles influenced his work, as did the vigorous realism of popular illustrators such as Daumier and Gavarni. Although famous for horses and dancers, Degas began with conventional historical paintings such as The Young Spartans, in which his gradual progress toward a less idealized treatment of the figure is already apparent. During his early career, Degas also painted portraits of individuals and groups; an example of the latter is The Bellelli Family (c.1858–67), a brilliantly composed and psychologically poignant portrayal of his aunt, her husband, and their children. In this painting, as in The Young Spartans and many later works, Degas was drawn to the tensions present between men and women. In his early paintings, Degas already evidenced the mature style that he would later develop more fully by cropping subjects awkwardly and by choosing unusual viewpoints.

L'Absinthe, 1876, oil on canvas, by Edgar Degas

By the late 1860s, Degas had shifted from his initial forays into history painting to an original observation of contemporary life. Racecourse scenes provided an opportunity to depict horses and their riders in a modern context. He began to paint women at work, milliners and laundresses. Mlle. Fiocre in the Ballet La Source, exhibited in the Salon of 1868, was his first major work to introduce a subject with which he would become especially identified, dancers.[26]

In many subsequent paintings dancers were shown backstage or in rehearsal, emphasizing their status as professionals doing a job. It is these dancers who have determined Degas's popularity to this day, from 1870 he increasingly painted ballet subjects. Amongst other reasons the ballet series was easy to sell and seeing as his brother's debts had left the family bankrupt, Degas needed money.[27] Degas began to paint café life as well. He urged other artists to paint "real life" instead of traditional mythological or historical paintings, and the few literary scenes he painted were modern and of highly ambiguous content. For example, Interior (which has also been called The Rape) has presented a conundrum to art historians in search of a literary source; internal evidence suggests that it may be based on a scene from Thérèse Raquin.[28]

As his subject matter changed, so, too, did Degas' technique. The dark palette that bore the influence of Dutch painting gave way to the use of vivid colors and bold brushstrokes. Paintings such as Place de la Concorde read as "snapshots," freezing moments of time to portray them accurately, imparting a sense of movement. The lack of color in the 1874 Ballet Rehearsal on Stage and the 1876 The Ballet Instructor can be said to link with his interest in the new technique of photography. The changes to his palette, brushwork, and sense of composition all evidence the influence that both the Impressionist movement and modern photography, with its spontaneous images and off-kilter angles, had on his work.[24]

Place de la Concorde, 1875, oil on canvas, by Edgar Degas, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg

Blurring the distinction between portraiture and genre pieces, he painted his bassoonist friend, Désiré Dihau, in The Orchestra of the Opera (1868-69) as one of fourteen musicians in an orchestra pit, viewed as though by a member of the audience. Above the musicians can be seen only the legs and tutus of the dancers onstage, their figures cropped by the edge of the painting. Art historian Charles Stuckey has compared the viewpoint to that of a distracted spectator at a ballet, and says that "it is Degas' fascination with the depiction of movement, including the movement of a spectator's eyes as during a random glance, that is properly speaking 'Impressionist'."[29]

Musicians in the Orchestra, 1872, oil on canvas, by Edgar Degas

Degas' mature style is distinguished by conspicuously unfinished passages, even in otherwise tightly rendered paintings. He frequently blamed his eye troubles for his inability to finish, an explanation that met with some skepticism from colleagues and collectors who reasoned, as Stuckey explains, that "his pictures could hardly have been executed by anyone with inadequate vision."[30] The artist provided another clue when he described his predilection "to begin a hundred things and not finish one of them,"[31] and was in any case notoriously reluctant to consider a painting complete.

His interest in portraiture led him to study carefully the ways in which a person's social stature or form of employment may be revealed by their physiognomy, posture, dress, and other attributes. In his 1879 Portraits, At the Stock Exchange, he portrayed a group of Jewish businessmen with a hint of anti-Semitism. In 1881 he exhibited two pastels, Criminal Physiognomies, that depicted juvenile gang members recently convicted of murder in the "Abadie Affair". Degas had attended their trial with sketchbook in hand, and his numerous drawings of the defendants reveal his interest in the atavistic features thought by some nineteenth century scientists to be evidence of innate criminality.[32] In his paintings of dancers and laundresses, he reveals their occupations not only by their dress and activities but also by their body type. His ballerinas exhibit an athletic physicality, while his laundresses are heavy and solid.[33]

At the Races, 1877–1880, oil on canvas, by Edgar Degas, Musée d'Orsay, Paris.

By the later 1870s Degas had mastered not only the traditional medium of oil on canvas, but pastel as well. The dry medium, which he applied in complex layers and textures, enabled him more easily to reconcile his facility for line with a growing interest in expressive color.

In the mid-1870s he also returned to the medium of etching, which he had neglected for ten years, and began experimenting with less traditional printmaking media—lithographs and experimental monotypes. He was especially fascinated by the effects produced by monotype, and frequently reworked the printed images with pastel.[34]

La Toilette (Woman Combing Her Hair), c. 1884–1886, pastel on paper, by Edgar Degas, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg

These changes in media engendered the paintings that Degas would produce in later life. Degas began to draw and paint women drying themselves with towels, combing their hair, and bathing (see: After the Bath). The strokes that model the form are scribbled more freely than before; backgrounds are simplified.

The meticulous naturalism of his youth gave way to an increasing abstraction of form. Except for his characteristically brilliant draftsmanship and obsession with the figure, the pictures created in this late period of his life bear little superficial resemblance to his early paintings. Ironically, it is these paintings, created late in his life, and after the heyday of the Impressionist movement, that most obviously use the coloristic techniques of Impressionism.[35]

For all the stylistic evolution, certain features of Degas's work remained the same throughout his life. He always painted indoors, preferring to work in his studio, either from memory or using models. [36] The figure remained his primary subject; his few landscapes were produced from memory or imagination. It was not unusual for him to repeat a subject many times, varying the composition or treatment. He was a deliberative artist whose works, as Andrew Forge has written, "were prepared, calculated, practiced, developed in stages. They were made up of parts. The adjustment of each part to the whole, their linear arrangement, was the occasion for infinite reflection and experiment."[37] Degas himself explained, "In art, nothing should look like chance, not even movement".[38]

Personality and politics

Degas, who believed that "the artist must live alone, and his private life must remain unknown",[39] lived an outwardly uneventful life. In company he was known for his wit, which could often be cruel. He was characterized as an "old curmudgeon" by the novelist George Moore,[39] and he deliberately cultivated his reputation as a misanthropic bachelor.[40] Profoundly conservative in his political opinions, he opposed all social reforms and found little to admire in such technological advances as the telephone.[39] He fired a model upon learning she was Protestant.[39] Although Degas painted a number of Jewish subjects from 1865 to 1870, his anti-Semitism became apparent by the mid 1870s. His 1879 painting At The Bourse is widely regarded as strongly anti-Semitic, with the facial features of the banker taken directly from the anti-Semitic cartoons rampant in Paris at the time.[41]

The Dreyfus Affair, which divided Paris from the 1890s to the early 1900s, further intensified his anti-Semitism. By the mid 1890s, he had broken off relations with all of his Jewish friends,[17] publicly disavowed his previous friendships with Jewish artists, and refused to use models who he believed might be Jewish. He remained an outspoken anti-Semite and member of the anti-Semitic "Anti-Dreyfusards" until his death.[42]

Reputation

Little Dancer of Fourteen Years, sculpture by Edgar Degas

During his life, public reception of Degas' work ranged from admiration to contempt. As a promising artist in the conventional mode, Degas had a number of paintings accepted in the Salon between 1865–1870. These works received praise from Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and the critic, Castagnary.[43]

Degas soon joined forces with the Impressionists, however, and rejected the rigid rules, judgements, and elitism of the Salon—just as the Salon and general public initially rejected the experimentalism of the Impressionists.

Degas's work was controversial, but was generally admired for its draftsmanship. His La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans, or Little Dancer of Fourteen Years, which he displayed at the sixth Impressionist exhibition in 1881, was probably his most controversial piece; some critics decried what they thought its "appalling ugliness" while others saw in it a "blossoming."[44] The suite of nudes Degas exhibited in the eighth Impressionist Exhibition in 1886 produced "the most concentrated body of critical writing on the artist during his lifetime. ... The overall reaction was positive and laudatory."[45]

Recognized as an important artist by the end of his life, Degas is now considered "one of the founders of Impressionism".[46] Though his work crossed many stylistic boundaries, his involvement with the other major figures of Impressionism and their exhibitions, his dynamic paintings and sketches of everyday life and activities, and his bold color experiments, served to finally tie him to the Impressionist movement as one of its greatest early artists.

His paintings, pastels, drawings, and sculpture—most of the latter were not intended for exhibition, and were discovered only after his death—are on prominent display in many museums.

After his death in 1917, more than 150 sculptural works were found in his studio, of which the subjects mainly consisted of race horses and dancers. Degas scholars have agreed that the sculptures were not created as aids to painting. His first and only showing of sculpture during his life took place in 1881 when he exhibited The Little Fourteen Year Old Dancer, only shown again in 1920; the rest of the sculptural works remained private until an exhibition after his death in 1918. Sculpture was not so much in response to his failing eyesight as one more strand to his continuing endeavour to explore different media. Wherever the possibility seemed available, he explored ways of linking graphic art and oil painting, drawing and pastel, sculpture and photography. Degas assigned the same significance to sculpture as to drawing: "Drawing is a way of thinking, modelling another."[47]

Although Degas had no formal pupils, he greatly influenced several important painters, most notably Jean-Louis Forain, Mary Cassatt, and Walter Sickert;[48] his greatest admirer may have been Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.[49]

Gallery

See also

References

Notes

  1. ^ a b Gordon and Forge 1988, p. 31
  2. ^ Turner 2000, p. 139
  3. ^ The family's ancestral name was Degas. Jean Sutherland Boggs explains that De Gas was the spelling, "with some pretentions, used by the artist's father when he moved to Paris to establish a French branch of his father's Neopolitan bank." While Edgar Degas's brother René adopted the still more aristocratic de Gas, the artist had reverted to the original spelling, Degas, by age thirty. Baumann, et al. 1994, p. 98.
  4. ^ Werner 1969, p. 14
  5. ^ Canaday 1969, p. 930-931
  6. ^ Baumann, et al. 1994, p. 154
  7. ^ Gordon and Forge 1988, p. 43
  8. ^ Thomson 1988, p. 48
  9. ^ Gordon and Forge 1988, p. 23
  10. ^ Guillaud and Guillaud 1985, p.29
  11. ^ Guillaud and Guillaud 1985, p.33
  12. ^ Armstrong 1991, p. 25
  13. ^ "In the final inventory of his collection, there were twenty paintings and eighty-eight drawings by Ingres, thirteen paintings and almost two hundred drawings by Delacroix. There were hundreds of lithographs by Daumier. His contemporaries were well represented—with the exception of Monet, by whom he had nothing." Gordon and Forge 1988, p. 37
  14. ^ Gordon and Forge 1988, p. 26
  15. ^ Gordon and Forge 1988, p. 34
  16. ^ Canaday 1969, p. 929
  17. ^ a b Guillaud and Guillaud 1985, p. 56
  18. ^ Bade and Degas 1992, p. 6.
  19. ^ Thomson 1988, p. 211
  20. ^ Mannering 1994, p. 7
  21. ^ Hartt 1976, p. 365
  22. ^ Gordon and Forge 1988, p. 11
  23. ^ Armstrong 1991, p. 22
  24. ^ a b Roskill 1983, p.33
  25. ^ Baumann, et al. 1994, p. 151
  26. ^ Dumas 1988, p. 9.
  27. ^ Growe 1992
  28. ^ Reff 1976, pp. 200-204
  29. ^ Guillaud and Guillaud 1985, p.28
  30. ^ Guillaud and Guillaud 1985, p. 29
  31. ^ Guillaud and Guillaud 1985, p.50
  32. ^ Kendall, et al. 1998, pp. 78–85 (seen at googlebooks here; also see discovermagazine.com
  33. ^ Muehlig 1979, p. 6
  34. ^ Thomson 1988, p. 75
  35. ^ Mannering 1994, pp. 70-77
  36. ^ Benedek "Style."
  37. ^ Gordon and Forge 1988, p. 9
  38. ^ Growe 1992
  39. ^ a b c d Werner 1969, p. 11.
  40. ^ Bade and Degas 1992, p. 6.
  41. ^ http://blogs.princeton.edu/wri152-3/f05/eharwood/insider_trading_degas_most_antisemitic_painting.html
  42. ^ Politics of Vision: Essays on 19th Century Art And Society
  43. ^ Bowness 1965, pp. 41-42
  44. ^ Muehlig 1979, p.7
  45. ^ Thomson 1988, p. 135
  46. ^ Mannering 1994, p. 6-7
  47. ^ Growe 1992
  48. ^ J. Paul Getty Trust
  49. ^ Guillaud and Guillaud 1985, p. 48

Sources

  • Armstrong, Carol (1991). Odd Man Out: Readings of the Work and Reputation of Edgar Degas. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226026957
  • Bade, Patrick; Degas, Edgar (1992). Degas. London: Studio Editions. ISBN 1851708456
  • Baumann, Felix; Karabelnik, Marianne, et al. (1994). Degas Portraits. London: Merrell Holberton. ISBN 1-85894-014-1
  • Benedek, Nelly S. "Chronology of the Artist's Life." Degas. 2004. 21 May 2004.
  • Benedek, Nelly S. "Degas's Artistic Style." Degas. 2004. 21 March 2004.
  • Bowness, Alan. ed. (1965) "Edgar Degas." The Book of Art Volume 7. New York: Grolier Incorporated :41.
  • Brettell, Richard R.; McCullagh, Suzanne Folds (1984). Degas in The Art Institute of Chicago. New York: The Art Institute of Chicago and Harry N. Abrams, Inc. ISBN 0-86559-058-3
  • Canaday, John (1969). The Lives of the Painters Volume 3. New York: W.W. Norton and Company Inc.
  • Capriati, Elio; I Segreti di Degas (2009). Milano: Mjm Editore. ISBN 978-88-95682-68-6
  • Dorra, Henri. Art in Perspective New York: Harcourt Brace Jocanovich, Inc.:208
  • Dumas, Ann (1988). Degas's Mlle. Fiocre in Context. Brooklyn: The Brooklyn Museum. ISBN 0-87273-116-2
  • "Edgar Degas, 1834-1917." The Book of Art Volume III (1976). New York: Grolier Incorporated:4.
  • Gordon, Robert; Forge, Andrew (1988). Degas. New York: Harry N. Abrams. ISBN 0-8109-1142-6
  • Growe, Bernd; Edgar Degas (1992). Edgar Degas, 1834-1917. Cologne: Benedikt Taschen. ISBN 3822805602
  • Guillaud, Jaqueline; Guillaud, Maurice (editors) (1985). Degas: Form and Space. New York: Rizzoli. ISBN 0-8478-5407-8
  • Hartt, Frederick (1976). "Degas" Art Volume 2. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall Inc.: 365.
  • "Impressionism." Praeger Encyclopedia of Art Volume 3 (1967). New York: Praeger Publishers: 952.
  • J. Paul Getty Trust "Walter Richard Sickert." 2003. 11 May 2004.
  • Kendall, Richard; Degas, Edgar; Druick, Douglas W.; Beale, Arthur (1998). Degas and The Little Dancer. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 0300074972
  • Mannering, Douglas (1994). The Life and Works of Degas. Great Britain: Parragon Book Service Limited.
  • Muehlig, Linda D. (1979). Degas and the Dance, 5-27 April May 1979. Northampton, Mass.: Smith College Museum of Art.
  • Peugeot, Catherine, Sellier, Marie (2001). A Trip to the Orsay Museum. Paris: ADAGP: 39.
  • Reff, Theodore (1976). Degas the artist's mind. [New York]: Metropolitan Museum of Art. ISBN 0870991469
  • Roskill, Mark W. (1983). "Edgar Degas." Collier's Encyclopedia.
  • Thomson, Richard (1988). Degas: The Nudes. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd. ISBN 0-500-23509-0
  • Tinterow, Gary (1988). Degas. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and National Gallery of Canada.
  • Turner, J. (2000). From Monet to Cézanne: late 19th-century French artists. Grove Art. New York: St Martin's Press. ISBN 0-312-22971-2
  • Werner, Alfred (1969) Degas Pastels. New York: Watson-Guptill. ISBN 0-8230-1276-X


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From Today's Highlights
July 19, 2005

Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do.
- Edgar Degas

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