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Jessica Locheed
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Abstract
Degas: A New Vision offered a rare, broad, and true career-spanning retrospective of Edgar Degas (1834–1917), whose body of work was produced over the course of half a century, in a trajectory that made many twists and turns. Degas was an artist deeply rooted in the traditions of the Renaissance and the Academy yet also one of the most avant-garde artists of his era. His innovations in monoprint, for example, both as a unique medium and in conjunction with pastel, show an experimental sensitivity to materials more commonly associated with modernists of the twentieth century.
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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
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
Theodore Reff, The Technical Aspects o f Degas's Art
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
Degas in Pieces: Form and Fragment in the Late Bather Pastels
Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, 2018
This article examines how Edgar Degas challenged the compositional and communicative integrity of the artwork by pinning together pieces of paper, pasting them on card, and developing motifs over joins between the segments. Through a close reading of Degas’s late bather pastels, the article locates Degas’s accretive working method within debates about the role of the “fragment” in mid- to late nineteenth-century art critical discourses. It is argued that focusing on Degas’s decision to create works “in pieces” is important for understanding both his place in nineteenth-century art history and the legacy of his oeuvre in European modernism.
Degas's Dancers: 1872-6 Ronald Pickvance
Burlington Magazine
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Pointillism Printing and its Impact on the artwork of Edgar Degas' Ballet Dancers
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.
Edgar Degas and the Ottocento
Of a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in Art History in the Graduate College of
A Hidden Portrait by Edgar Degas
Scientific reports, 2016
The preservation and understanding of cultural heritage depends increasingly on in-depth chemical studies. Rapid technological advances are forging connections between scientists and arts communities, enabling revolutionary new techniques for non-invasive technical study of culturally significant, highly prized artworks. We have applied a non-invasive, rapid, high definition X-ray fluorescence (XRF) elemental mapping technique to a French Impressionist painting using a synchrotron radiation source, and show how this technology can advance scholarly art interpretation and preservation. We have obtained detailed technical understanding of a painting which could not be resolved by conventional techniques. Here we show 31.6 megapixel scanning XRF derived elemental maps and report a novel image processing methodology utilising these maps to produce a false colour representation of a "hidden" portrait by Edgar Degas. This work provides a cohesive methodology for both imaging and...
Degas: Agency in Images of Women
Valley Humanities Review, 2013
Many scholars have been quick to read Impressionist Edgar Degas' work as either misogynistic or as privileging women with agency. Recently, feminist art history has provoked a rereading of these two main arguments. This essay argues for the importance of a middle ground because Degas' representations of the female form are so varied that it is both difficult and problematic to make conclusions about his perception and subsequent depiction of women.
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ROBERTA CRISCI-RICHARDSON The Unmarriageable Artist: the History Paintings of Edgar Degas
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.
Beyond the form: the ineffable essence of Degas' sculpture
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.
"Degas the Sonneteer": Transcending Disciplinary Boundaries and Building a New Aesthetic
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.
Degas in Florence : A Newly-Identified Portrait Drawing of Degas by Giovanni Fattori
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...
“Edgar Degas, Junior Milliners, 1882,” catalogue entry
French Paintings and Pastels, 1600–1945: The Collections of The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2023
In Junior Milliners, Degas shows his affinity for the milliners of Paris, the hat-making capital of the world. Two women are absorbed in their work, putting the finishing touches on exquisite chapeaus. With her eyes cast down and to the left, the woman in navy blue studies the placement of a frilly blue ostrich feather, perhaps sewing it into place. Her colleague, dressed in olive green, watches her progress. Degas depicts the interiority of the women as they elevate plain orbs of beige straw-like the one perched on a slender hat stand in the middle of the table-to confections of blue and yellow silk and feathers. Degas equates the milliners' craft to that of an artist; the women stand statuesque, absorbed in creating beautiful objects for consumption. Degas composes a harmonious arrangement of negative and positive space, repeating the shapes of the almost-A hat is quite a poem; it's a symphony, it's a melody, it's always a masterpiece to create.
Degas and Hiroshige
Edgar Degas's series of 50 landscape monotypes reworked with pastel are simultaneously prints, paintings and drawings. In the autumn of 1890 the artist travelled through Burgundy to the village of Diénay, where he set to work on the prints in the studio of his friend Georges Jeanninot. These were his first serious forays into landscape since his Impressionist pastels of 1869. In some cases the prints take on a dream-like quality, reaching a degree of abstraction unequalled in Claude Monet's paintings for another decade or more. One could say that he now worked as an anti-Impressionist, for rather than sitting before his subject, he looked to his memory and imagination. In at least one instance, as he worked in the studio, Degas had in mind a specific colour woodcut by Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858), Asuma Shrìne and the Entwined Camphor , made in 1857 as part of One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, one of his most popular series.1 Degas's ι. Inv. 30.1478.31. 259. Edgar Degas, Winding River, 1890, colour monotype reworked with pastel, sheet 295 χ 389 mm (Minneapolis Institute of Arts).
Exhibition review of Degas à l’Opéra, Musée d’Orsay, 24 September 2019 – 19 January 2020. Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide (fall, 2020).
Lauded as the "peintre des danseuses," [1] no other artist has delved into the world of ballet as profoundly as Edgar Degas (1834-1917). For four decades, the ballet fired his creative impulses, inspiring a corpus of nearly 1300 works of art. Be it the characterization of the broad cast of dramatis personae he encountered, the technical aspects of a dance position, or the intricacies of backstage sexual politics, he captured these aspects with the acuity and familiarity of an insider. Organized by the Musée d'Orsay, the Musée de l'Orangerie, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, this exhibition celebrates the 350th anniversary of the Opéra de Paris, which, in addition to being the primary opera company of France, is also the country's primary ballet company. Degas at the Opéra, which opened in Paris last fall, is not the first exhibition to explore the artist's passion for ballet, but it is the most comprehensive, immersive, and lavish one to date, and it adds to his ballet pictures those of opera and music. [2] Spanning ten thematically and chronologically organized rooms, the Musée d'Orsay showcased over two hundred works, including sculptures, fans, architectural dioramas, and other exclusive loans of rarely seen objects from the vaults of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. This panoramic exhibition proposes that many of Degas's most audacious and groundbreaking innovations came in response to the ballet. As established in the introductory text panel and catalogue by Musée d'Orsay curators Leïla Jarbouai, Marine Kisiel, and Henri Loyrette, and the National Gallery of Art's Kimberly A. Jones, the Opéra was a "laboratory," a "veritable catalyst" for Degas's boldest pictorial Chong: Degas à l'Opéra Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 19, no. 2 (Autumn 2020) 134 inventions and technical experimentations across various media. There, he drew from an endless wellspring of subject matter, mixing and matching motifs observed in situ or conceived in the studio. Thus, closely entwined with this analogy of the Opéra as laboratory was the notion of artifice. As the panel introducing the exhibition explained, "Degas rejects painting from nature, and this transmutation takes place in the studio, filtered by memory, and enriched by his imagination. Hence, while his Opéra may well appear real, it is never true to life." Experimentation and synthesis were at the heart of Degas's enterprise-an assertion underscored by the location of the largest gallery, "The Opera, Technical Laboratory," at the very center of the exhibition's floorplan. At the entrance, a large vinyl reproduction of Degas's The Curtain (ca. 1880) greeted visitors (fig. 1). In the image, ominous men in black, wealthy subscribers to the opera with access to its backstage, prowl amidst the painted shrubbery on the scenery flats, preying upon young dancers, hinting at a nefarious undercurrent at the ballet explored later in the exhibition. The first gallery, entitled "Genetics of Movement," opened with a sunny scene of ancient Greece: Young Spartan Girls Challenging Boys also known as Spartan Girls Exercising (ca. 1860-62/1880; fig. 2). Partly based on Plutarch's Life of Lycurgus, this anchor painting provided the entry point that elucidated the link between classical sources and Degas's dance vocabulary. During his three-year Italian sojourn (July 1856-April 1859), Degas immersed himself in the study of Hellenistic sculpture and Old Masters such as Masaccio, Giotto, Mantegna, and Michelangelo. He also dedicated time to life-drawing at the Villa Medici, where Gustave Moreau instilled in him a new appreciation for colorists like Titian, Veronese, and Delacroix. By the end of his trip, he had amassed an impressive portfolio of copies and studies that would serve as visual references for limitless pictorial inventions. The generous selection of Degas's early figure drawings underlined the inherited traditions in his approach to the human body (fig. 3). While these works invoked iconic ancient sculptures such as the Borghese Gladiator, Diana of Galbi, and Hermes Fastening his Sandal, they simultaneously prefigured the staple motifs in his ballet repertoire, such as a ballerina's adjustment of her shoulder strap or a yawn synchronized with an outstretched arm. The integration of Degas's sketches of dancers revealed his use of classical quotations with their quotidian gestures and poses (fig. 4). To quote Jarbouai from her summation of Spartan Girls Exercising: "What we have are recollections of this classic piece of Greek sculpture [the Borghese Gladiator], refracted through the intensely real presence of a live model" (49). The London painting also reflected the artist's respect for the petits rats of the Opéra, who embodied the athleticism, strength, discipline, and rigorous training of their Spartan predecessors. [3] On the opposite wall, the Copy after Mantegna's 'Crucifixion' offered additional insight into the sources for Degas's truncated forms, dynamic figural groupings, and compositional space. As Loyrette aptly notes in the catalogue, the artist's history paintings from the 1860s can be construed as a "dress rehearsal" for his future opera pictures (31).
Paperwork and fragmentation in Edgar Degas’s “Bureau Pictures”
Word & Image, 2021
This article identifies a group of paintings by Edgar Degas as “bureau pictures,” representations of workplaces, creative or commercial, in which piles of paper are spread on desks. Through his depiction of paper, as well as his affective casting of the way in which human figures relate to their piles of paper, Degas explores the intertwined gestures of creative and bureaucratic labor. Paper’s tendency to offer a medium for fragmentation was represented in contemporary literature by Théophile Gautier and Émile Zola. In these texts and in Degas’s images, papery fragmentation takes two forms: either as a creative scattering symptomatic of an anti-classical aesthetic informed by Romanticism, or as an instrument of bureaucracy and administration, as in Zola’s representation of the stock market and the department store. Ultimately, in the bureau pictures, Degas does not take a definitive stance, but rather dwells on the way in which the two approaches intermingle, such that it is impossi...
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