Edgar Degas

French painter

• Born: July 19, 1834
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: September 27, 1917
• Place of death: Paris, France

Degas was one of the great figural painters and draftsmen of the nineteenth century. His work combined a deep understanding of tradition with a commitment to innovative portrayals of modern life. His artistic independence was asserted in his role as one of the leading figures of the Impressionistic exhibitions of 1874-1886.

Early Life

Edgar Degas (day-gah) was born into a comfortable, upper-bourgeois Parisian family. His father managed the local branch of the family bank, headquartered in Naples, and his mother was the daughter of a cotton broker in New Orleans. The family’s social connections in France, Italy, and the United States would play an important role in shaping Edgar’s life and character. Frequent visits to the Louvre, as well as to the homes of friends who had substantial private collections, were regarded as an essential part of the boy’s upbringing. Edgar attended the prestigious Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, where he received his first instruction in drawing. Upon graduation in 1853, he briefly studied law but soon turned his attention wholeheartedly to a career in art.

Degas’s early artistic training consisted of two stages: the period 1853-1856, spent mostly in Paris, and the period 1856-1859, dominated by two lengthy sojourns in Italy. In Paris, Degas studied under Louis Lamothe, a follower of the disciplined classicism of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Working independently, Degas devoted much time to copying paintings in the Louvre and prints in the Bibliothèque Nationale. In 1855, he enrolled in the École des Beaux Arts. Instead of completing his formal studies and competing for the coveted Prix de Rome, however, he decided to go to Italy on his own. In Naples and Florence, where he visited relatives, and in Rome, where he stayed at the French Academy, Degas’s devotion to the art of the past was expanded and deepened. At the same time, his contact with other young French artists studying in Italy, such as Gustave Moreau, helped turn his attention to the more recent achievements of artists such as Eugène Delacroix.

Apart from many copies and sketches, the most important works produced by Degas during these early years were portraits of family members. The crowning achievement of these early portraits was The Bellelli Family , a large painting of his Florentine relatives begun in Italy in 1858 and completed several years later in Paris. In its technical mastery and psychological sensitivity, this painting announced the beginning of a major career.

Life’s Work

The emergence of Degas’s artistic personality during the 1860’s was characteristically complex. Soon after his return from Italy, he established a studio in Paris and began to work on a series of large history paintings. Although inspired in part by the classical tradition, Degas’s historical scenes tended to recast tradition through a disarming straightforwardness of treatment. The last of this group of pictures, Scene of War in the Middle Ages , was shown at the Salon of 1865 as Degas’s first major publicly exhibited work. Ironically, that marked the beginning of Degas’s public career and the end of his interest in history painting. The following year, he exhibited The Steeplechase , and in 1868 he showed Mlle Fiocre in the Ballet “La Source.” The themes of the racetrack and the ballet proclaimed the artist’s new commitment to the subject matter of contemporary life. This commitment would be a decisive factor in determining the subsequent course of his career.

Degas’s interest in contemporary subjects was inspired and shared by a growing circle of progressive artists and writers with whom he began associating during these years. By around 1862, he had met Édouard Manet, leader of a new generation of artists devoted to painting modern life, and Edmund Duranty, a naturalist writer and critic who would become a champion of Degas’s art during the 1870’s. Through the frequent gatherings of artists at the Café Guerbois, Degas became familiar with Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and other young artists who would eventually form the core of the Impressionist group. His keen, perceptive intellect and brusque humor soon established Degas’s prominence within the group. Although his role would develop into one of dedicated leadership, he would always maintain a degree of the aloofness of an outsider. An intriguing glimpse of this complex personality is provided in the Self-Portrait of about 1863, in which confidence, irony, and self-consciousness seem to coexist behind a facade of bourgeois elegance.

The 1870’s were both a climax and a turning point in Degas’s career. His paintings of familiar urban entertainments such as the ballet achieved full maturity, and his circle of colleagues finally banded together and organized a series of independent exhibitions. At the same time, however, he experienced some unexpected setbacks. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 found him serving in the artillery, and at this time he began to have problems with his eyesight. His financial security was seriously compromised as a result of the failure of the family bank following his father’s death in 1874. Degas’s commitment to the risky venture of the independent exhibitions from the first show in 1874 until the last one in 1886 is all the more impressive in the face of these circumstances.

Degas’s accomplishments as an artist during the 1870’s were an extraordinary combination of fully realized maturity and restless experimentation. The ballet scenes were a dominant theme, beginning with such works as The Orchestra of the Opera (c. 1870) and The Dance Class (1871), which established the performance hall and the rehearsal studio as the two realms of Degas’s exploration of the dance. His portraits achieved new complexity and psychological depth, as exemplified by the group of paintings of his New Orleans relatives, done when the artist visited them in 1872-1873, and by various portrayals of friends and colleagues such as the portrait of Duranty of 1879. Several new themes were introduced or given greater prominence during the years of the Impressionist exhibitions, including the café and the café-concert, milliners, laundresses, and prostitutes. Along with these diverse themes, an increasing attention to varied techniques such as pastel, lithography, monotype, and sculpture contributed to the rich complexity of Degas’s mature art.

The most decisive changes in Degas’s later work were introduced in the years around 1880. The interest in sculpture was bold, experimental, and largely private. The subjects of the sculptures, especially dancers and bathers, paralleled the themes of his paintings at a time when pastel was increasingly replacing oil as his principal pictorial medium. The rich textures and glowing colors of the pastel bathers of the 1880’s and 1890’s represent the grand culmination of Degas’s career. Seven such pictures were shown at the last Impressionist exhibit in 1886, including the famous Woman Bathing in a Shallow Tub . By presenting the nude in unconventionally natural poses seen from unexpected angles in realistic surroundings, these works revitalized tradition through an emphasis on the immediacy of experience and the ingenuity of artistic innovation.

Degas’s late work was hampered by failing eyesight, although flashes of brilliance continued to appear until he finally had to stop painting entirely around 1908. He was able to turn his attention to collecting because of the rising prices he was receiving for his works, but for the most part the last years leading up to his death in 1917 were characterized by a frustrating inactivity and isolation.

Significance

Edgar Degas’s artistic contribution can be summarized in terms of his complex relation to Impressionism. As a leading figure behind the Impressionist exhibitions, Degas made a historic commitment to artistic independence that would help set the stage for the development of modern art. His dedication to subjects drawn from modern life and to bold technical and stylistic innovation are aspects of his art that played an integral role within the group. On the other hand, he was persistently somewhat of an outsider whose attitudes and alliances increasingly factionalized the group. He particularly opposed the label Impressionist (he preferred “Independents”) and its associations with a spontaneous, directly naturalistic art.

Although Degas’s art was committed to contemporary subjects and steeped in observation and experience, Degas was never entirely a naturalist. In contrast to Monet, who rejected tradition and painted directly before his subjects in nature, Degas executed his works in the studio and relied heavily on calculation, imagination, and memory of earlier works of art. His artistic repertoire expanded from an early love of Ingres and the classics to include such nontraditional sources as Japanese prints and photography, but throughout his career Degas’s art remained informed by other art as much as by nature.

Even Degas’s favorite themes, such as the theater and the ballet, reveal an antinaturalistic orientation in which the artificiality of costume, pose, and stage set are celebrated. By studying the richness of life in a variety of such artificial contexts, Degas was creating an art dedicated to the modern city. By advancing the importance of direct experience and innovation in art without discarding the lessons of tradition, he was both contributing to the emergence of modernism and transcending it.

Bibliography

Adriani, Götz. Degas: Pastels, Oil Sketches, Drawings. Translated by Alexander Lieven. New York: Abbeville, 1985. The English translation of the catalog was produced in conjunction with the 1984 exhibition in Tübingen and Berlin. Includes a scholarly introductory essay, a well-documented catalog, and excellent illustrations.

Benfey, Christopher. Degas in New Orleans: Encounters in the Creole World of Kate Chopin and George Washington Cable. New York: Random House, 1997. Degas visited New Orleans in the autumn of 1872 to visit his relatives; he had both white and black relatives living there. Benfey describes the social turmoil in New Orleans during the Reconstruction era, and how this atmosphere and the city inspired Degas’s art.

Boggs, Jean Sutherland. Degas at the Races. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Arts, 1998. Study of Degas’s consuming interest in horses, jockeys, and racing and its place in his work. More than 120 paintings, drawings, sculptures, and pastels. Catalogs the 1998 exhibit of Degas’s work at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Degas, Hilaire Germain Edgar. Degas: The Complete Etchings, Lithographs, and Monotypes. Text by Jean Adhémar and François Cachin. Translated by Jane Brenton. New York: Viking Press, 1974. A thoroughly illustrated and documented catalog of Degas’s prints, with brief, informative introductory essays.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Letters. Edited by Marcel Guérin. Translated by Marguerite Kay. Oxford, England: B. Cassirer, 1947. The English translation of the standard edition of the artist’s letters. Provides important personal insights into his art, thought, and character.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Notebooks of Edgar Degas. Edited by Theodore Reff. 2 vols. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1976. A carefully documented and annotated catalog of Degas’s thirty-seven notebooks in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. An indispensable publication on the artist’s sources, development, and creative processes.

De Vonyar, Jill, and Richard Kendall. Degas and the Dance. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002. Degas painted and drew ballet dancers and other aspects of the ballet more frequently than any other subject. This catalog, which accompanied an exhibition of Degas’s ballet-related artwork, reproduces some of these works and describes the artist’s relationship to the ballet.

Growe, Bernd. Degas. New York: Taschen, 2001. A brief (96-page) analysis of Degas’s art, part of the Basic Art Series. Although Degas is considered to be an Impressionist, Growe maintains he never fully adopted that style, but was far more influenced by classical painting techniques.

Halévy, Daniel. My Friend Degas. Translated by Mina Curtiss. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1964. A personal account of Degas during his later years, based on the journal Halévy began keeping in 1888 and continuing through the artist’s death.

McMullen, Roy. Degas: His Life, Times, and Work. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984. A comprehensive biography that is both scholarly and readable. Although considerable attention is given to major works, the emphasis throughout is on the artist’s life and character. The best general biography in English.

Reff, Theodore, ed. Degas: The Artist’s Mind. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. A collection of essays on various aspects of Degas’s art. Most of the essays are revised versions of articles originally published in scholarly journals. A selection of important motifs, sources, and techniques are considered with a goal of better understanding Degas’s artistic thought.