Edgar Degas The-dancers by GEORGE T. M. SHACKELFORD

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.

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

Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 73/74, 2020

2012

Sculpture Journal, 2009

86 | Sculpture Journal 18.1 [2009] Degas' sculpture betrays a passion for process, structure, material, form, space, suspended movement, privacy and personal voice. Although often studied, the intended function and meaning have hitherto eluded the numerous attempts to classify or contain them. In lieu of a traditional identity as sculpture, these works seem to have been intended to defy precise definition and to enjoy a life beyond that of formal exhibition or public visual consumption. This article sets out to demonstrate that the primary key to understanding Degas' sculpture lies in the reintegration of the works into a larger personal theoretical context, and specifically to demonstrate that there are many parallels between Degas' sculpture and the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé. Consideration of Degas' works in terms of a Mallarméan theory will provide a new foundation upon which to understand Degas' quest for the ephemeral and ineffable, traits which are dominant in his sculpture. This cross-fertilization between the arts of poetry and sculpture provides the requisite clues to decode the language, structure and intended function of Degas' sculpture.

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.

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...

Reading and understanding his poetry as an innovative and exciting medium through which he expressed themes similar to those he explored in his visual art provides the best perspective for our understanding of some aspects of his late works. The question is rather what influence these principles might have exerted over the vocabulary of his plastic arts.My analysis will thus focus on the examination of Degas's sonnets as an integral element of his overall artistic expression, a means to a dynamic end. Close analysis of Degas's themes and use of form and symbolic language reveals not only his awareness of, but also his active dialogue with,Mallarmé's theories of poetic structure, dance, and-as understood in the context of Symbolism-a symbiotic sympathy between the arts.

Manet to Picasso: Masterpieces from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2010

“Degas’s The Dance Lesson (1879),” paper presented at the Department of French and Francophone Studies Graduate Student Conference: Equinoxes 2022: Wear & Tear | Usure(s). Brown University, Providence.

Pointillism is considered part of Impressionism, and it is the specialty of some artists who focused on producing their works in a pointillist style in which the elements within the painting are determined by a set of points that are constructive according to the color theory and light in the Impressionists movement, artists such as Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, and Camille Pissarro and other artists who went through that experience with their works.In this study, the researcher worked on transferring pointillism to an impressionist artist, but he was not among those who went through the pointillism experience at that time, namely Edgar Degas. The study adopted the descriptive-experimental approach to describe the style and works of Degas and the application of pointillism to some of his works related to ballerinas, using the technique of pointillism printing by using cotton swabs.Everything related to the artist, his style, and his view of his subject matter related to ballerinas are explained, and how the effect of pastel colors can serve the sense of color when applied in the form of pointillism. As a measuring tool for the research, the researcher used the structural analysis of the pointillism layers divided according to colors, i.e., each layer built on the surface is dedicated to a specific color or shades of color, through which the researcher measures the experiments that succeeded in implementing what is required of them to answer the research question.The study experience was applied in the College of Basic Education for students majoring in art education who spent between two to three years in the major, and the applied number for this study was 22 students. The study was implemented in a semester, i.e., for a period of four months, during which the students meet for implementation for four hours every week.The results differ in this study in terms of quality, context, style, and method of implementation, with individual differences between students and their talent. The works were implemented in different ways that were analyzed in the research, and it was found that the student's thoughts and understanding of the idea of the study differed, as some of them added things that resulted in raising the structural quality of pointillism, and that raised the creative aspect of each work, and this is what gives this study important in the field of art and art education.

2015

I. In his attitude toward the technical aspects of his art, Degas was at once more radical and more conservative than almost any major artist of his generation. While the other Realists and Impressionists were largely content to employ the most conventional techniques of European art, even as they brought about the most far-reaching changes in its content and formal structure, he experimented constantly with materials and methods whose novelty would match that of his vision of modern life. But on the other hand, while his colleagues accepted the limitations of the relatively simple traditional techniques they used, enjoying the spontaneity of expression these afforded, he longed for the virtuosity and mystery he associated with the more complex methods of the old masters, blaming their loss on the shallow materialism of his own age. He could delight in the search for new procedures and remark with disdain, when told of another artist's satisfaction at having "found" his method, "Heureuse-ment que moi, je n'ai pas trouve ma maniere; ce que je m'embeterais."' But he could also despair of his ignorance , asserting to the young Rouault, "a propos de