Edgar Degas

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Born: 1834

Died: 1917

Summary of Edgar Degas

Edgar Degas was a member of the foundational group of Paris artists that began exhibiting together in the 1870s and is best known as an Impressionist. He adopted many of their innovative techniques, was fascinated by the difficulty of capturing light effects, and was drawn to images of urban recreation. However, Degas’ academic knowledge and personal preference for Realism placed him apart from his colleagues, and he refused to be labelled a “Impressionist,” choosing instead to call himself a “Independent.”

His family fortune allowed him to make his own way in the world, and it subsequently allowed him to retire from the Paris art world and sell paintings at his leisure. He was fascinated by the human figure, and he tried to capture the body in unexpected postures in his many photographs of women – dancers, singers, and laundresses. While critics of the Impressionists concentrated their criticism on their technical advances, Degas’s lower-class themes drew the greatest criticism.

Degas’s lifelong fascination with the human body was informed by his formal education, yet he handled it in novel ways. Under artificial light, he photographed odd poses from unique angles. He eschewed the academic ideal of the mythological or historical topic in favour of finding his characters in contemporary settings, such as the ballet.

Degas’ academic experience instilled in him a strong classical inclination in his work, which ran counter to the Impressionists’ approach. They preferred colour and a greater focus on surface texture, whereas he emphasised line as a way to characterise contours and provide strong compositional structure to a painting. He also liked to work from drawings and memory in the conventional academic style, whereas they preferred to paint outside (en plein air).

Degas, like many other Impressionists, was influenced by Ukiyo-e Japanese prints, which introduced innovative compositional ideas. The prints had stark linear patterns and a feeling of flatness that contrasted sharply with the typical Western image, which depicted the world from a perspective.

The way Degas treated his female subjects creates an intriguing and perplexing contradiction. There is plenty of evidence that he was a misogynist, as well as plenty of proof that he was so fascinated with the feminine form that he tried to depict it in its purest form via hundreds of meticulous studies. Whatever the case may be, his research and work advanced the study of the figure and portrait in all of the visual arts.

Childhood

Célestine Musson de Gas, an American by origin, and Auguste de Gas, a banker, had five children, the eldest of whom was Edgar Degas. In 1870, Edgar altered his surname to ‘Degas,’ which sounded less aristocratic. He was encouraged from an early age to explore the arts, but not as a long-term profession, as he was born into a rich Franco-Italian family. Following his graduation with a bachelor in literature in 1853, Degas, at eighteen years old, registered as a copyist at the Louvre, which he subsequently said is the basis for every real artist.

He abandoned up on his father’s dream of Degas becoming a lawyer after a brief stint in law school. He was accepted to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1855, where he studied drawing under Louis Lamothe, an academic artist and former student of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. “Draw lines, young man., draw lines.” Ingres remarked, and Degas is supposed to have followed his advice. Degas was fascinated by Gustave Courbet’s Pavilion of Realism, which was on display at the Exposition Universelle that year.

Early Life

Degas visited his aunt, the Baroness Bellelli, and her family in Naples, Italy, when he was 22 years old. This three-year journey was a turning point in his career, culminating in the Realist picture The Bellelli Family (1859). He scoured Italy’s museums and galleries for hours, studying Renaissance masterpieces by Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian, among others.

In 1864, while copying a Velázquez painting at the Louvre, he happened into Édouard Manet, who was also copying the same artwork. His connection with Manet was crucial to Degas’s, and most likely Manet’s, development as an artist, as well as the development of Impressionism as a whole. Manet, who was loud and well-liked, had a totally different personality from Degas, who was contemplative and frequently self-doubting. However, their friendship and close relationship remained until Manet’s death, as detailed in Sebastian Smee’s book “The Art of Rivalry”

The next year, Degas showed in the Paris Salon for the first of six consecutive years, showing works such as Édouard Manet and Mme. Manet (1868-69) and The Orchestra of the Opera (1868-69), paintings that blurred the borders between portraiture and genre painting. During rifle training, Degas discovered that his eyesight was impaired while serving with the National Guard in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871). Even in his most famous works, evidence of this hereditary abnormality may be detected.

Mid Life

Degas’s most famous body of work was made in the 1870s, despite the fact that the 1860s were a fruitful time in his career. He’d found his genuine muse – Paris – by this time. He took inspiration from its boulevards, cafés, boutiques, dancing studios, drawing rooms, theatres, and operas, much as Manet and other Impressionists did. And he became recognised for his keen observation, investing a lot of effort to capture the details of the people around him. Perhaps this is why he scorned the term “Impressionist,” thinking it to imply something haphazard and unfinished.

Foyer de la Danse (1872), Musicians in the Orchestra (1872), and A Carriage at the Races (1872) are all examples of this (1873). Each of these works also exemplifies Degas’s use of unusual angles of view, implying the viewpoint of a preoccupied observer. Degas, unlike his colleagues Renoir and Monet, did not paint outdoors, preferring the light and consistency of the studio. His few outside images, by the way, were created partly from memory and partly from his imagination.

Degas travelled to New Orleans from 1872 to 1873 to see his brother René and other family members, notably his uncle, who ran a failed cotton trade. Several notable paintings were created on this journey, notably A Cotton Office in New Orleans (1873), which was the only one of his works to be purchased by a museum during his lifetime. Following Degas’ return to France, the French Impressionists had their first group exhibition at the Café Guerbois, which featured Degas. Despite their friendship, Degas kept the other members at a distance. He respected their work and shared many of their goals, but he never completely agreed with them.

Degas remained a bachelor for the rest of his life, with few, if any, romantic relationships. This has generated debate as to why he paints women in such odd and typically unfavourable ways. Though feminist critics have pointed out that the impact is sometimes demeaning, his goal may have been to portray the figures taken off guard. Any male painter who spends so much time (famously) portraying the female body is certain to be chastised, and the same is true for a female who abstracts the naked male.

In reality, there is a lot to think about when it comes to Degas’ portrayal of women in his work, and much of it (as well as the following) is beautifully explored in a Degas article by writer and art critic Julian Barnes. Detractors include poet Tom Paulin, who remarked in 1996, “in this exhibition are women in contorted poses. They’re like performing animals, they’re like animals in the zoo.”

But it’s also worth recalling the common methods of artists of his time, who tended to work from a female model, draw her in a semi-voluptuous (or even sexual) way, and end (or even begin) with a tryst of some sort. “He’s a strange gentleman – he spends the whole four hours of the sitting combing my hair” one sitter said about Degas. That specific sitter was voicing his dissatisfaction. An observer may possibly perceive Degas in a more benign light after studying the hundreds of portrayals of ladies dancing, bathing, and combing their hair by the painter.

Late Life

As the nineteenth century drew to a conclusion, Degas’s output slowed, and he began to collect the works of other painters he liked. He collected works by contemporaries like as Manet, Pissarro, van Gogh, Gauguin, and Cézanne, as well as earlier painters such as Delacroix and Ingres, who had influenced Degas as a young man. Degas’s late works, such as the bronze Woman Rubbing Her Back with a Sponge (1900), demonstrate his commitment to portraying the feminine form.

Degas continued to create in a number of media, including pastels and photographs, after abandoning oil painting later in life, although sculpture became his favourite medium as his eyesight worsened. He became increasingly reclusive, and most of his connections with painters like as Monet and Renoir disintegrated over time. Degas’s open anti-Semitism, which was accentuated by his position during the notorious Dreyfus Affair, accelerated these ruptures. In 1917, he passed away.

Degas’ status as one of the leaders of late-nineteenth-century French painting was solid by the time he died, despite criticism throughout his lifetime. His stronger propensity toward Realism, which distinguished him from the Impressionists, had also come to be recognised. His fame has only grown after his death, despite the fact that he has been the subject of much scholarly scrutiny and criticism since the 1970s, largely because of his sexist depictions of women. Some have even linked his antisemitism and general lack of moral compass to his treatment of the other sex.

Famous Art by Edgar Degas

The Bellelli Family

1858-1867

The effect of Realism on the young Degas may be seen in this picture, which has a muted palette and an unusual grouping of people, such as the guy having his back to the spectator. It was produced over the period of three to four years, during which he made many visits to Italy. Each family member – his aunt, her husband, and his two young cousins Giovanna and Giuliana — was painted separately before being assembled into a family picture, which became more of a study of individual personalities than a collective study.

Foyer de la Danse

1872

All of Degas’ ballerina studies, of which there are many, have something distinctive and appealing about them. In Foyer de la Danse, he offers us one of the unusual viewpoints that are so characteristic of his work. Rather of evoking the scene’s light and mood, as some of his Impressionist contemporaries may have done, Degas has opted to create a stunning spatial arrangement that mirrors his contemporaries’ experiences in the new modern metropolis.

La Toilette (Nude Arranging Her Hair)

1884-1886

La Toilette is representative of Degas’s many nudes, and representative of an approach to the nude that made this body of work extremely divisive, both among his contemporaries and later critics. It displays his preference for capturing the figure from behind while washing; showing only a segment of the body to imply the entire; and placing the figure in shallow space, enabling her curves to create the strong linear design that balances the picture. His nudes were chastised by critics for never having defined faces and appearing to be cleaning themselves as if they were dirty, as if Degas depersonalised his subjects.

BULLET POINTED (SUMMARISED)

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• Edgar Degas was a member of the foundational group of Paris artists that began exhibiting together in the 1870s and is best known as an Impressionist.
• He adopted many of their innovative techniques, was fascinated by the difficulty of capturing light effects, and was drawn to images of urban recreation.
• However, Degas’ academic knowledge and personal preference for Realism placed him apart from his colleagues, and he refused to be labelled an “Impressionist,” choosing instead to call himself an “Independent.”
• His family fortune allowed him to make his own way in the world, and it subsequently allowed him to retire from the Paris art world and sell paintings at his leisure.
• He was fascinated by the human figure, and he tried to capture the body in unexpected postures in his many photographs of women – dancers, singers, and laundresses.
• While critics of the Impressionists concentrated their criticism on their technical advances, Degas’s lower-class themes drew the greatest criticism.
• Degas’s lifelong fascination with the human body was informed by his formal education, yet he handled it in novel ways.
• They preferred colour and a greater focus on surface texture, whereas he emphasised line as a way to characterise contours and provide strong compositional structure to a painting.
• Degas, like many other Impressionists, was influenced by Ukiyo-e Japanese prints, which introduced innovative compositional ideas.
• The prints had stark linear patterns and a feeling of flatness that contrasted sharply with the typical Western image, which depicted the world from a perspective.

Information Citations

En.wikipedia.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/.

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