Edgar Degas

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Edgar Degas
Edgar Degas <tr><td style="text-align:left;">Birth name</td><td>Edgar Degas</td></tr>
Born	July 19, 1834 Paris, France
Died	September 27, 1917 Paris, France
Nationality	French
Field	Painting, Sculpture, Drawing
Movement	Impressionism
Famous works	The Belleli Family, Head of a Young Woman, Estelle Musson, Ballerina and Lady with Fan

Edgar Degas (19 July 1834 – 27 September 1917) was a French artist famous for his work in painting, sculpture, and drawing. His early study of classical art prefaced a body of mature works which convincingly placed the human figure in contemporary environments. He is regarded as one of the founders of impressionism.

1 Early life
2 Artistic career
3 Artistic style
4 Reputation
5 References
- 5.1 Notes
- 5.2 Sources
6 External links

[edit] Early life

Degas was born in Paris, France to Celestine Musson de Gas, and Augustin de Gas, a banker. The de Gas family was moderately wealthy. At age 11, Degas began his schooling, and started down the road of art with enrollment in the Lycee Louis Grand.

Degas began to paint seriously early in life; by eighteen he had turned a room in his home into an artist's studio, but he was expected to go to law school, as were most aristocratic young men. Degas, however, had other plans and left his formal education at age 20. He then studied drawing with Louis Lamothe, under whose guidance he flourished, following the style of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres.<ref>Canaday, 1969, p. 930-931</ref> In 1855 Degas met Ingres and was advised by him to "draw lines, young man, many lines."<ref>Canaday, 1969, p. 931</ref> In that same year, Degas received admission to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. The next year, Degas traveled to Italy, where he saw the paintings of Michelangelo, Raphael, and other artists of the Renaissance.

[edit] Artistic career

After returning from Italy, Degas copied paintings at the Louvre. In 1865 some of his works were accepted in the Salon. During the next five years, Degas had additional works accepted in the Salon, and gradually gained respect in the world of conventional art.<ref>Benedek "Chronology"</ref> In 1870, at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, 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.<ref>Guillaud and Guillaud, 1985, p.29</ref>

Following the war, Degas visited his brother, René, in New Orleans and produced a number of works, many of family members, before returning to Paris in 1873. The following year, Degas helped to organize the first Impressionist Exhibition. The Impressionists subsequently held seven additional shows, the last in 1886, and Degas showed his work in all but one. At around the same time, Degas also became an amateur photographer, both for pleasure, and in order to accurately capture action for painting.<ref>Hartt, p. 365</ref>

At the death of his father in 1874, the subsequent settling of the estate revealed that 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. He now found himself suddenly dependent on sales of his artwork for income. <ref>Guillaud and Guillaud, 1985, p.33</ref> After several years his financial situation improved, and sales of his own work permitted him to indulge his passion for collecting works by artists he admired—old masters like El Greco, moderns such as Delacroix, and his contemporaries Cézanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh. Ingres and Manet were especially well represented.<ref>Guillaud and Guillaud, 1985, p. 56</ref>

As the years passed, Degas became isolated, due, in part, to his belief "that a painter could have no personal life."<ref>Canaday, 1969, p. 929</ref> The Dreyfus Affair controversy brought his antisemitic leanings to the fore, and he broke with all his Jewish friends.<ref>Guillaud and Guillaud, 1985, p. 56</ref> 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.<ref>Thomson, 1988, p. 211</ref> He never married and spent the last years of his life, nearly blind, "aimlessly wandering the streets of Paris"<ref>Mannering, 1994, p. 7</ref> before dying in 1917.

[edit] Artistic style

Image:Edgar Germain Hilaire Degas 021.jpg

Degas is often identified as an Impressionist, an understandable but insufficient description. <ref>Mannering, 1994, p. 7</ref> Technically Degas differed from the Impressionists in that he "never adopted the Impressionist color fleck" <ref>Hartt, 1976, p. 365</ref> and "disapproved of their work." <ref>Mannering, 1994, p. 7</ref> Degas is, however, described more accurately as an Impressionist than as a member of any other movement. Impressionism originated in the 1860s and 70s 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.

Degas had his own distinct style, one developed from two very different influences, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, and Japanese prints. <ref>Dorra, p.208</ref> Degas, though famous for horses and dancers, began with conventional historical paintings such as The Young Spartans. During his early career, Degas also painted portraits of individuals and groups; an example of the latter is The Bellelli Family, (1859) a brilliantly composed and psychologically poignant portrayal of his aunt, her husband and children. In these early paintings, Degas already evidenced the mature style that he would later develop more fully by cropping subjects awkwardly and portraying historical subjects in a less idealized manner.<ref>Mannering, 1994, pp. 11-13</ref> Also during this early period, Degas was drawn to the tensions present between men and women. <ref>Benedek "Style."</ref>

By the late 1860s, Degas had shifted from his intitial 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.<ref>Dumas, 1988, p. 9</ref> In many subsequent paintings dancers were shown backstage or in rehearsal, emphasizing their status as professionals doing a job. Degas began to paint café life as well. He urged other artists to paint 'real life' instead of traditional mythological or historical paintings. <ref>Benedek "Style."</ref> His rare literary scenes were modern and of highly ambiguous content; for example, Interior, which was probably based on a scene from Thérèse Raquin.<ref>Mannering, 1994, pp. 22, 25</ref> As his subject matter changed, so, too, did Degas' technique. The dark palette which bore the influence of Dutch painting gave way to the use of vivid colors and bold brushstrokes.

Image:Edgar Degas Place de la Concorde.jpg

Paintings such as Place de la Concorde read like "snapshots," freezing moments of time to show them accurately, imparting a sense of movement. His paintings also showed subjects from unusual angles. All of these techniques were used with Degas's self-expressed goal of "'bewitching the truth'".<ref>Hartt, p.365</ref>

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 14 musicians in an orchestra pit, viewed as though by a member of the audience. Above the musicians can be seen the legs and tutus of the dancers onstage, their figures cropped by the edge of the painting. Art historian Charles Stuckey has pointed out that the viewpoint is that of a distracted spectator at a ballet, and 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'."<ref>Guillaud and Guillaud, 1985, p.28</ref>

Degas' mature style is distinguished by conspicuously unfinished passages, even in otherwise tightly rendered paintings.<ref>Gordon and Forge, 1988, p. 56</ref> He frequently blamed his eye troubles for his inability to finish, an explanation that met with some skepticism from colleagues and collectors who reasoned that his pictures "could hardly have been executed by anyone with inadequate vision."<ref>Guillaud and Guillaud, 1985, p. 29</ref> The artist provided another clue when he described his predilection "to begin a hundred things and not finish one of them,"<ref>Guillaud and Guillaud, 1985, p.50</ref> and was in any case "notorious for his inability to consider a painting complete."<ref>Dumas, 1988, p. 34</ref>

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 1879's Portraits, At the Stock Exchange, he portrayed a group of Jewish businessmen with a hint of the misanthropy which would increase with age.

At the Races, 1877 – 1880, 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 to more easily 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.<ref>Thomson, 1988, p. 75</ref>

These changes 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 more freely scribbled than before; backgrounds are simplified. The meticulous naturalism of his youth gave way to an increasing abstraction of form. But for the 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 Degas's life, and after the end of the Impressionist movement, that use the coloristic techniques of Impressionism. <ref>Mannering, 1994, pp. 70-77</ref>

For all the stylistic evolution, certain features of Degas's work remained the same throughout his life. He always worked in his studio, painting either from memory or models. <ref>Benedek "Style."</ref> 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 "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."<ref>Gordon and Forge, 1988, p. 9</ref>

[edit] Reputation

Image:Bronze DancingGirl.JPG

During his life, public reception of Degas' work ran the gamut from admiration to contempt. As a promising artist in the conventional mode, and in the several years following 1860, Degas had a number of paintings accepted in the Salon. These works received praise from Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and the critic Castagnary.<ref>Bowness, 1965, pp. 41-42</ref> However, Degas soon joined forces with the Impressionists and rejected the Salon, just as the Salon and general public rejected the Impressionists. Degas made no important contributions to the style of the Impressionists; instead, his contributions involved the organization of their exhibitions. His work was controversial, but was generally admired for its draftsmanship. 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."<ref>Thomson, 1988, p. 135</ref> At the time of his death Degas was recognized as an important artist<ref>Canaday, 1969, p. 935</ref> and today, Degas is thought of as "one of the founders of impressionism".<ref>Mannering, 1994, p. 6-7</ref> His paintings, pastels, drawings, and sculpture—most of the latter were not intended for exhibition, and were only discovered after his death—are on prominent display in many museums. Although Degas had no formal pupils, he did greatly influence several important painters, most notably Jean-Louis Forain, Mary Cassatt and Walter Sickert;<ref>J. Paul Getty Trust</ref> his greatest admirer may have been Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.<ref>Guillaud and Guillaud, 1985, p. 48</ref>

[edit] References

[edit] Notes

[edit] Sources

Baumann, Felix; Karabelnik, Marianne, et al. (1994). Degas Portraits. London: Merrell Holberton. ISBN 1-8594-014-1
Benedek, Nelly S. "Chronology of the Artist's Life." Degas. 2004. 21 May 2004 <http://www.metmuseum.org/explore/Degas/html/indexl.html>.
Benedek, Nelly S. "Degas's Artistic Style." Degas. 2004. 21 March 2004 <http://www.metmuseum.org/explore/Degas/html/index1.html>.
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.
Dorra, Henri. Art in Perspective New York: Harcourt Brace Jocanovich, Inc.:208
Dumas, Ann (1988). Degas's Mlle. Fiocre in Context. Brooklyn: The Brooklyn Musem. 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
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 <http://www.getty.edu/art/collections/bio/a3670-1.html>.
Mannering, Douglas (1994). The Life and Works of Degas. Great Britain: Parragon Book Service Limited.
Peugeot, Catherine, Sellier, Marie (2001). A Trip to the Orsay Museum. Paris: ADAGP: 39.
Thomson, Richard (1988). Degas: The Nudes. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd.
Tinterow, Gary (1988). Degas. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and National Gallery of Canada.