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Degas Edgar | 1834-1917 | [ Back | Photos ]
"...Aspects of Degas's work - mainly,
his ballet paintings from the 1880S
- have long been popular with a broad
audience; too much so for their own
good. But he has never been a "popular"
artist like the wholly inferior Auguste
Renoir, whose Paris-Boston retrospective
in 1985 beguiled the crowds and bored
everyone else. Degas was much harder
to take, with his spiny intelligence
(never Renoir's problem), his puzzling
mixtures of categories, his unconventional
cropping and, above all, his "coldness"
- that icy, precise objectivity which
was one of the masks of his unrelenting
power of aesthetic deliberation. Besides,
the long continuities of his work
have not always been obvious."
The figure you think he skimmed
from the street like a Kodak turns
out to have been there already, in
Ingres or Watteau or some half-forgotten
seventeenth-century draftsman who
suited his purposes. Degas was the
most modern of artists, but his kind
of modernity, which entailed a passionate
working relationship with the remote
as well as the recent past, hardly
exists today. How we would have bored
him, with our feeble jabber of postmodernist
"appropriation"!
"In his late years Hilaire-Germain-Edgar
Degas was chatting in his studio with
one of his few friends and many admirers,
English painter Walter Richard Sickert.
They decided to visit a café. Young
Sickert got ready to summon a fiacre,
a horse-drawn cab. Degas objected.
"Personally, I don't like cabs. You
don't see anyone. That's why I love
to ride on the omnibus-you can look
at people. We were created to look
at one another, weren't we?"
"No passing remark could take you
closer to the heart of nineteenth-century
Realism: the idea of the artist as
an engine for looking, a being whose
destiny was to study what Balzac,
in a title that declared its rebellion
from the theological order of Dante's
Divine Comedy, called La Comédie Humaine."
"The idea that the goal of creative
effort lay outside the field of allegory
and moral precept was quite new in
the 1860s when Degas was coming to
maturity as a painter. The highest
art was still history painting, in
which France had reigned supreme;
but since 1855 practically the whole
generation of history painters on
whom this elevation depended - Paul
Delaroche, Ary Scheffer, Horace Vernet
and, above all, Eugéne Delacroix and
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres - had
died, and no one seemed fit to replace
them. French critics and artists alike,
and conservative ones in particular,
felt a tremor of crisis, as others
would a century later as the masters
of modernism died off. After them,
what could sustain the momentum of
culture? "His presence among us was
a guarantee, his life a safeguard,"
ran Ingres's obituary in the Gazette
des Beaux-Arts in 1867."
"And yet beyond the ruins of the
temple, something else was stirring:
a sense of the century as unique in
itself, full of what Charles Baudelaire
called the "heroism of modern life."
Its chief bearers, in painting, were
to be Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas.
"Born in 1834 into a rich Franco-Italian
banking family with branches in Paris,
Naples and New Orleans, Degas was
never short of money and never doubted
his vocation as a painter, in which
his family encouraged him. He was
a shy, insecure, aloof young man -
if one did not know this from the
testimony of his friends, one would
gather it from his early self-portraits,
with their veiled look of mannerist
inwardness acquired from Pontormo
- and, it seems, unusually devoid
of narcissism: unlike almost every
nineteenth-century painter one has
heard of, he gave up painting his
own face at thirty-one. It was the
Other that fascinated him: all faces
except his own."
"In time he would construct a formidable
"character" to mask his shyness: Degas
the solitary, the feared aphorist,
the Great Bear of Paris. He never
married - "I would have been in mortal
misery all my life for fear my wife
might say, 'That's a pretty little
thing,' after I had finished a picture."
Certainly he was not homosexual. The
more likely guess is that he was impotent.
If so, all the luckier for art: his
libido and curiosity were channeled
through his eyes."
"He had a reputation for misogyny,
mainly because he rejected the hypocrisy
about formal beauty embedded in the
depilated Salon nudes of Bouguereau
and Cabanel - ideal wax with little
rosy nipples. "Why do you paint women
so ugly, Monsieur Degas?" some hostess
unwisely asked him. "Parce que la
femme en general est laide, madame,
" growled the old terror: "Because,
madam, women in general are ugly."
"This was a blague. To find Degas's
true feelings about women, one should
consult the pastels and oil paintings
of nudes that he made, at the height
of his powers, in the 1880s and 1890s.
Some critics still find them "clinical,"
because they seem to be done from
a point outside the model's awareness,
as though she did not know he was
there and were not, actually, posing.
"I want to look through the keyhole,"
Degas said. The bathers were "like
cats licking themselves." Their bodies
are radiant, worked and reworked almost
to a thick crust of pastel, mat and
blooming with myriad strokes within
their tough winding contours. But
they are also mechanisms of flesh
and bone, all joints, protuberances,
hollows, neither "personalities" nor
pinups. (One sees why Duchamp, inventor
of the mechanical bride, adored and
copied Degas.) Not even Nude Woman
Having Her Hair Combed, 1886-88, the
most refined and classical of these
nudes, seems in the least Renoiresque,
although nothing could be more consummately
appealing than that pink, slightly
blockish body against the gold couch
and the regulating white planes of
peignoir and apron. It was a subject
to which Degas brought special, almost
fetishistic feeling, and a later version
of the same theme, The Coiffure, 1896,
shows what a vehicle for innovation
it could be: by now the contours of
the woman and her maid are roughed
out with an almost Fauvist abruptness,
and they emerge from a continuous
orange-russet field that seems to
predict Matisse's Red Studio - in
fact Matisse once owned this painting,
although he bought it from Degas's
studio sale in 1918, long after his
Red Studio was finished."
"Looking back from old age, Degas
reflected that "perhaps I have thought
about women as animals too much,"
but he had not - although he was certainly
reproached for doing so. His "keyhole"
bathers provoked the crisis of the
Ideal Nude, whose last great exponent
had been the man Degas most revered,
Ingres. Yet their exquisite clarity
of profile could not have been achieved
without Ingres's example. In them,
the great synthesis between two approaches
that, thirty years before, had been
considered the opposed poles of French
art - Ingres's classical line, Delacroix's
Romantic color - is achieved. There
is no clearer instance of the way
in which true innovators, such as
Degas, do not "destroy" the past (as
the mythology of avant-gardism insisted):
they amplify it."
"In their novel Manette Salomon (1867)
the Goncourts had Coriolis, an artist,
reflect on "the feeling, the intuition
for the contemporary, for the scene
that rubs shoulders with you, for
the present in which you sense the
trembling of your emotions.... There
must be found a line that would precisely
render life, embrace from close at
hand the individual, the particular
- a living, human, inward line - a
drawing truer than all drawing."
"Degas thinly disguised, you would
think. But at the time, the Goncourts
did not know Degas; they would come
to meet him later. Neither, strangely
enough, did Degas meet his literary
parallel, Gustave Flaubert, whose
Madame Bovary had made its scandalous
and prosecuted debut in 1856 - although
he had certainly read him. Flaubert's
objectivity, his impassioned belief
in "scientific" description as the
instrument of social fiction, his
acute sensitivity to class, his sardonic
humor - all find their counterpart
in Degas. And so does his attitude
to the past as source and example,
the springboard for invention in the
present. "There must be no more archaisms,
clichés," Flaubert wrote about the
difficulty of prose. "Contemporary
ideas must be expressed using the
appropriate crude terms; everything
must be as clear as Voltaire, as abrim
with substance as Montaigne ... and
always streaming with color." Read
Ingres and Delacroix for Voltaire
and Montaigne, and you have Degas
in a nutshell."
"Nothing escaped his prehensile eye
for the texture of life and the myriad
gestures that reveal class and work.
He made art from things that no painter
had fully used before: the way a discarded
dress, still warm from the now naked
body, keeps some of the shape of its
wearer; the unconcern of a dancer
scratching her back between practice
sessions (The Dance Class, 1873-76);
the tension in a relationship between
a man and a woman (Sulking, 1875-76)
or the undercurrent of violence and
domination in an affair (Interior,
sometimes known as The Rape, 1868--69);
a laundress's yawn, the stoned heaviness
of an absinthe drinker's posture before
the dull green phosphorescence of
her glass, the exact port of a dandy's
cane, the scrawny professional absorption
of the petits rats of the ballet corps,
the look in a whore's eye as she sizes
up her client, the revealing clutter
on a writer's desk. Even when painting
themes from the Bible or from ancient
history, as he often did in his early
years, there were, as Henri Loyrette
points out in the catalogue, "contemporary
concerns beneath a thin archaeological
veneer." His Scene of War in the Middle
Ages, 1863-5, whose erotically charged
women victims prefigure his bathers,
refer to the brutality inflicted on
women in New Orleans (where all his
maternal family lived) by Union troops
in the Civil War."
"Degas did not suddenly "become"
a Realist. That was a myth propagated
by his friends in the Impressionist
circle at Batignolles, especially
Édouard Manet, who implicitly claimed
the credit for his conversion. What
happened was more subtle: gradually
this quintessential young bourgeois
discovered what was to be seen from
the eyeline of the bourgeoisie, but
he raised his theater of social observation
on the foundations of strict academic
training in the mold of Ingres, whose
precision he never lost. His eye for
the instant gesture and socially revealing
incident went with a lifelong habit
of recycling poses and motifs, patching
them in. Thus he can be very deceptive:
the image that seems the freshest
product of observation turns out to
have been used half a dozen times
before. Degas copied everything from
Mantegna to Moghul miniatures, and
even the work of lesser painters than
himself; an artist, he said, should
not be allowed to draw so much as
a radish from life without the constant
habit of drawing from the old masters.
(By the same token, he was an avid
collector of both old and new art:
in his sixties he purchased two Gauguins,
and when pushing eighty he remarked
with some admiration of Cubism that
"it seems even more difficult than
painting." Allegory, in his early
work, went with the desire to see
freshly - and it would return in strange
forms in his old age, as in the painting
of a fallen jockey whose horse is
clearly one of the steeds of the Apocalypse,
or Russian Dancers, three women in
clumping boots, locked together in
a straining mass like Goya's witches.
Both are present in his first real
masterpiece, done in 1858 after he
got back to Paris: The Bellelli Family,
that marvelously observed group portrait
of his neurotic aunt Laura, her lazy
and distracted husband, Gennaro, and
their two daughters. For although
it is a tour de force of Realist observation
- how much more concrete and present
the Bellellis seem to us, surrounded
by the furniture and other stuff of
their lives, than the people on the
neutral brown grounds Manet borrowed
from Velázquez! - it is also an allegory,
of family continuity under stress:
the drawing on the wall behind Laura
Bellelli is of Degas's grandfather
Hilaire, and she is pregnant, so that
four generations, not two, are present
in the picture. And you cannot fail
to associate this with Degas's own
working methods, the sense of filiation
and descent that would breathe through
his work for the rest of his life,
the past feeding into the present
and then out into the future. Degas,
the synthesizer of Ingres and Delacroix,
would point - through the wild color-fields
and direct manual touch of his later
years - to a modernism that was not
yet born."
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| Degas Edgar |
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| The Bellelli family |
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| The Orchestra of the Opera |
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| Dancers |
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| The morning bath |
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| The dance class |
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| The Absinthe drinker |
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| Singer with a glove |
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| Woman combing her hair |
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| The rape |
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| Retiring |
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| Laundry girls |
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