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Art Boutique - a Supergallery for French Art Prints and Framing
PLEASE VISIT OUR ART BOUTIQUE TO PURCHASE DEGAS PRINTS


EDGAR DEGAS

Le Tub The art of Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas, b. Paris, July 19, 1834, d. Sept. 26, 1917, reflects a concern for the psychology of movement and expression, the harmony of line and continuity of contour. These characteristics set Degas apart from the other impressionist painters, although he took part in all but one of the 8 impressionist exhibitions between 1874 and 1886.

Degas was the son of a wealthy banker, and his aristocratic family background instilled into his early art a haughty yet sensitive quality of detachment. As he grew up, his idol was the painter Jean Auguste Ingres, whose example pointed him in the direction of a classical draftsmanship, stressing balance and clarity of outline. After beginning his artistic studies with Louis Lamothes, a pupil of Ingres, he started classes at the École des Beaux Arts but left in 1854 and went to Italy. He stayed there for 5 years, studying Italian art, especially Renaissance works.

Returning to Paris in 1859, he painted portraits of his family and friends and a number of historical subjects, in which he combined classical and romantic styles. In Paris, Degas came to know Edouard Manet, and in the late 1860s he turned to contemporary themes, painting both theatrical scenes and portraits with a strong emphasis on the social and intellectual implications of props and setting.

Classe Danse In the early 1870s the female ballet dancer became his favorite theme. He sketched from a live model in his studio and combined poses into groupings that depicted rehearsal and performance scenes in which dancers on stage, entering the stage, and resting or waiting to perform are shown simultaneously and in counterpoint, often from an oblique angle of vision. On a visit in 1872 to Louisiana, where he had relatives in the cotton business, he painted The Cotton Exchange at New Orleans (finished 1873; Musée Municipal, Pau, France), his only picture to be acquired by a museum in his lifetime. Other subjects from this period include the racetrack, the beach, and cafe interiors.

After 1880, PASTEL became Degas's preferred medium. He used sharper colors and gave greater attention to surface patterning, depicting milliners, laundresses, and groups of dancers against backgrounds now only sketchily indicated. For the poses, he depended more and more on memory or earlier drawings. Although he became guarded and withdrawn late in life, Degas retained strong friendships with literary people. In 1881 he exhibited a sculpture, Little Dancer (a bronze casting of which is in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), and as his eyesight failed thereafter he turned increasingly to sculpture, modeling figures and horses in wax over metal armatures. These sculptures remained in his studio in disrepair and were cast in bronze only after his death.


Mark Roskill
Source: The New Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia, Release #8, ©1996.
Bibliography: Boggs, J. S., Portraits by Degas (1962); Jean Bouret, Degas: His Life and Work, trans. by Daphne Woodward (1965); Jan Dunlop, Degas (1979); François Fosca, Degas: Biographical and Critical Studies, trans. by James Emmons (1954); R. Gordon, and A. Forge, Degas (1988); J. and M. Guillard, Edgar Degas: Pastels (1989); Daniel Halevy, My Friend Degas, trans. by Mina Curtiss (1964); R. Kendall, ed., Degas by Himself (1988); E. Lipton, Looking into Degas: Uneasy Images of Women and Modern Life (1986); C.W. Millard, The Sculpture of Degas (1977); Theodore Reff, Degas: The Artist's Mind (1976, repr. 1987); J. Rewald, Degas Sculpture (1951, repr. 1989); Denys Sutton, Edgar Degas: Life and Work (1986); Antoine Terrasse, Degas (1974).
Images: "Le tub" (Giraudon/Art Resource, NY); "Classe danse (The Dancing class)" (Musée d'Orsay, Paris).
Copyrights Notice and Disclaimer: Images of artists' works displayed throughout this site have been obtained from numerous sources, including digital libraries at educational institutions, educational software, and Mark Harden's Artchive. Credit is attributed when known. Some works are considered to be in the public domain, based on current U.S. and international copyright acts. For more information on copyright laws, please refer to the Artists Rights Society and Benedict O'Mahoney's The Copyright Web Site. [See also: DiscoverFrance.net Copyrights.]

Degas Links:

Ballet Dancer Looking at the Sole of Her Right Foot
Take a close-up view of this bronze Degas sculpture in the permanent collection at Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida.

CGFA - Virtual Art Museum
Carol L. Gerten maintains an impressive image library of meticulously scanned works from hundreds of renowned artists, including this collection featuring 16 of Degas' paintings.

College Street Journal
Chris Benfey, chair of the American Studies program at Mount Holyoke College, writes about painter Edgar Degas' life in the nineteenth century, and the significance of his brief visit to post-Civil War New Orleans. He has also written a book on the subject, entitled "Degas in New Orleans: Encounters in the Creole World of Kate Chopin and George Washington Cable" (available in Hardcover or Paperback).

J. Paul Getty Museum
In the mid-1890s, after completing the majority of his paintings and experimenting with pastel and monotype, Degas briefly focused his agile intellect on photography, excellent examples of which are represented in the Getty Museum collection.

Little Dancer
The Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska, offers slides of numerous French artists' works on its web site. This one is Degas' two-thirds life-size portrait of a 14-year-old unknown Paris ballerina, sculpted in plaster.

National Gallery of Art
The NGA offers a virtual tour of its collection of six Degas paintings.

Paintings and Sculptures of Edgar Degas
Professor Jeffery Howe offers a look at four of Degas' sculptures and four of his paintings (part of Boston College's Digital Archive of Art).

The Unquiet Spirit: The Life and Art of Edgar Degas
SFSU's audio-visual catalog of French Studies offers a 65-minute videotape, exploring the life and work of this complex man and unorthodox artist. Especially controversial was his treatment of women as subjects, whom he dared to show as real people engaged in often unglamorous activities. Includes a survey of his fragile and rarely-viewed wax sculptures.

WebMuseum: Edgar Degas
The prolific Nicolas Pioch has assembled a biography of the artist, along with numerous images of his works displayed in prestigious museums and private collections around the world.

SUGGEST A SITE
Do you know of a great Degas site we should list here? Please submit it!

Degas Quotations:

"What a delightful thing is the conversation of specialists! One understands absolutely nothing and it's charming." (1)

"No art is less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and the study of the great masters; of inspiration, spontaneity, temperament ... I know nothing." (2)

"It is all very well to copy what one sees, but it is far better to draw what one now only sees in one's memory. That is a transformation in which imagination collaborates with memory." (3)

"One must do the same subject over again ten times, a hundred times. In art nothing must resemble an accident, not even movement." (4)

"Everyone has talent at twenty-five. The difficulty is to have it at fifty." (5)

Sources of Quotations: (1) 31 Jan 1892, in "Degas Letters," Appendix, ed. by Marcel Guerin, 1947. (2-5) "The Notebooks of Edgar Degas," 1976.

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