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Edgar Degas and the Ottocento

Profile image of Claire KovacsClaire Kovacs

Abstract

Of a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in Art History in the Graduate College of

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Mapping Degas: Real Spaces, Symbolic Spaces and Invented Spaces in the Life and Work of Edgar Degas (1834–1917) by Roberta Crisci-Richardson
Janet Whitmore

Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, 2016

Roberta Crisci-Richardson's recent biography of Edgar Degas (1834-1917) is based on her 2009 dissertation from the University of Melbourne as well as numerous articles related to the artist that she has published in a variety of journals. As the title suggests, Mapping Degas: Real Spaces, Symbolic Spaces and Invented Spaces in the Life and Work of Edgar Degas (1834-1917) proposes a "geographic and biographic approach to mapping Degas's life and work," investigating "the whereabouts, both actual and symbolic, of the artist" (184). The author maintains that her "resulting interpretation of Degas is that he was neither a classicist artist nor a conservative bourgeois, but an avant-garde artist of progressive ideals looking not to the Southern and classical models but to the art of Northern Europe, especially that of the [Dutch] Golden Age" (184). In supporting this basic premise, Crisci-Richardson organizes the book into geographic categories, including chapters on Italy and Normandy, but focusing on different aspects of Paris throughout most of the text. Following an Introduction acknowledging the extensive number of existing publications on Degas, Crisci-Richardson delves into the artists's early life in Paris. Much of this is a wellresearched compilation of current Degas literature, as is the following chapter on Italy. It is there, though, that the author introduces a recurring theme about the role of seventeenthcentury Dutch and Flemish art in shaping Degas's aesthetic. During the three years that the artist spent traveling and studying in Italy (1856-59), Crisci-Richardson notes that he developed "an appreciation of color as well as of a variety of artistic techniques, gained in the company of Gustave Moreau.[1] The second non-Italian thing he would bring to Paris was a taste for such artists as Rembrandt, Velázquez, Rubens, and most of all, Anthony van Dyck" (71). For Crisci-Richardson, this study of northern baroque masters refutes the accepted art historical understanding of Degas: "Against the vision of a Degas classicist, to which the history of art has accustomed us, it appears that it is this look northward, and the reference to the painters of the Northern Baroque that run through the painting of Degas

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ROBERTA CRISCI-RICHARDSON The Unmarriageable Artist: the History Paintings of Edgar Degas
Rosa Spinillo

In this paper Edgar Degas' history paintings are read as the painter's reflection on the irreconcilability of married life and artistic vocation, a major theme of discussion among artists and writers in nineteenth-century France. In The Young Spartans Exercising (1860-62) we see bachelors being banned from participation in the Gymnopaediae. In The Daughter of Jephthah (1859-60), Semiramis Building Babylon (1860-62) and Scene of War in the Middle Ages (1863-65), Degas shows famous unmarried women, femmes fortes who have chosen to pursue spiritual rather than mortal passions, all alter-egos for the artiste célibataire who chooses devotion to art over a family-centred bourgeois life. This article contributes to the view that Degas was neither a misogynist nor a narrow-minded bourgeois. Far from having preconceived patriarchal ideas on marriage and women, Degas choose to remain an artiste célibataire in accordance with the more extreme aspects of the nineteenth-century French cult of the artist as genius. It is the idea of the exceptional status of the artist that Degas elaborates in his history paintings, and that rendered him unmarriageable.

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Degas in Florence : A Newly-Identified Portrait Drawing of Degas by Giovanni Fattori
Norma Broude

The Burlington Magazine, 1973

O N 4th August r8s8, Edgar Degas arrived in Florence as the guest of his aunt and uncle Bellelli.1 Intending at first to stop only briefly on his way home to France, he subsequently decided to stay and await the return of his aunt Laura, who had been called before his arrival to the bedside of her ailing father in Naples. Despite the frequent and insistent summonses issued by his own father over the next months, Degas, a usually dutiful son, repeatedly put off his departure for home, and did not in fact leave Florence until the end of March r8sg, some eight months after his arrival.2 The important role which this Florentine sojourn played in Degas's early development has long been recognized by students of Degas's art, and much has been written about the activities and circumstances which induced him to prolong his stay: his relationship with the members of the Bellelli family and the evolution of his ambitious group portrait of them; 3 his extensive activity as a copyist af...

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Degas's Dancers: 1872-6 Ronald Pickvance Burlington Magazine
Rosa Spinillo

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Degas’s Portrait of Mademoiselle Fiocre and the Orientalism of Modern Life
Mary Manning

Rutgers Art Review, 2014

In scholarship on Edgar Degas (1834-1917), the artist’s two main idols, Ingres and Delacroix, have remained touchstones for discussing Degas’s approach to dessin and couleur. However, in the endless writing about Degas’s appropriations of figures and subjects from other artists, the influence of Ingres and Delacroix as upholders of the French Orientalist tradition has never been taken into account. This paper posits that, in his work of the 1860s, Degas sought to respond to this Orientalist tradition, to reconcile his demonstrated interest in ancient artifacts with his life in modern Paris, and, potentially, to grapple with his perception of himself as an outsider both as an artist and as a Frenchman of mixed heritage. His early combinations of Near Eastern subjects with motifs from the artistic tradition — Semiramis Building Babylon (c. 1861) and Woman with Ibis (1860-62) — manifest this anxiety and fall short of fulfilling his ambitious goals. However, by 1868, when Degas produced the Portrait of Mlle Fiocre in the Ballet “La Source,” his strategic plundering of Salon Orientalism and his desire to depict modern life clashed productively. While the Portrait of Mademoiselle Fiocre has been discussed alternately by scholars as one of his most peculiar portraits and his first attempt at depicting the ballet, I argue that it may be best read as a depiction of the “Orientalism of modern life” — a sophisticated mélange of the traditional harem scene, a contemporary Orientalist spectacle in Paris, and the devastating isolation that, for Degas, accompanied the arrival of modern life.

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