Edgar Degas Overview

An aristocrat who stood aloof from the sweaty fray of art movements, Degas emerged from his ecole des Beaux-Arts training with a predilection for Italian old masters and for classicizing French forerunners like Ingres. He painted portraits of upper-class families with... [more]

An aristocrat who stood aloof from the sweaty fray of art movements, Degas emerged from his ecole des Beaux-Arts training with a predilection for Italian old masters and for classicizing French forerunners like Ingres. He painted portraits of upper-class families with hints of Realism showing through the casual poses of his subjects and their unadulterated expressions. A chance encounter with Manet, however, dragged Degas into full contact with contemporary art. They met in 1861, when Manet found Degas copying a Velasquez in the Louvre and introduced him to the circle of young artists who became the Impressionists. Degas' attention shifted to new subjects: cafe life, horse racing, the ballet, the circus, and the theater. He depicted common people as well as the wealthy, and made studies of seemingly spontaneous or unobserved moments -- when, for example, a dancer hovers in mid-air during a jete, or a woman sits disconsolate at a cafe table. His technique involved extensive preparatory drawings and careful composition. As he confessed, there was nothing spontaneous about it. What he recorded on his repeated journeys to the rehearsal halls of ballet troupes was the rhythm and ritual of exercise, the inflection of the human body. He differed from the rest of the Impressionists in his lack of obsession with landscape and natural light. His paintings, instead, contrast the somber colors of the theater with the light-filled pastels of dancers' tulle, or the flat green of racing turf with the cream or vermilion of jockeys' silks. An aristocrat to the end, Degas pursued his own interests regardless of the Impressionist movement, but nonetheless is considered one of its founding figures. [show less]