Hilaire Germain Edgar de Gas, known as Edgar Degas (Paris, July 19, 1834 - Paris, September 27, 1917), was a French painter, printmaker, sculptor, and photographer. He is known above all for his particular vision of the ballet world, knowing how to capture the most beautiful and subtle scenes.
He is also known for his famous pastel tones and for being one of the founders of impressionism. Many of his works are preserved today in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, where the artist was born and died.
If we want to classify him in the history of art, most of Degas's consecrated works are linked to the Impressionist movement - formed in France in the late 19th century as a reaction to the academic painting of the time.
With him were Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, August Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, and Camille Pissarro, who, tired of being refused in official exhibitions, associated and created their own school to be able to present and teach their works to the public.
Impressionist art is often described by the effects of light in the open air. These characteristics are not, however, applicable to Degas: even though he was one of the main animators of the Impressionist exhibitions, he does not fit into the movement that, in the name of freedom to paint, characterizes the group.
He prefers to paint outdoors and at a distance, "what we see only in our memory." Addressing a painter he says, "For you, natural life is necessary, for me, fictional life."
If Degas is officially part of the Impressionist movement, he does not identify with them in the best known characteristics. His exceptional status does not escape the critics of the time, often unsettled by his avant-gardism. Several of his paintings were the subject of controversy, and even today Degas' work is the subject of numerous debates by art historians. Edgar Degas rests in his family tomb at the Montmartre cemetery in Paris.
Edgar Degas's Biography
The first-born son of wealthy banker Auguste de Gas and Célestine Musson, Edgar Hilaire Germain Degas was born in Paris on July 19, 1834. His father belonged to a noble family from Brittany, who had moved to Naples during the French Revolution; his mother, Célestine, was originally from New Orleans (Louisiana) and her family was engaged in cotton production.
He was baptized Edgar-Hilaire Germaine de Gas and spent his childhood on St. George Street, near the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris. Even with four brothers and sisters, he had a childhood affected by the death of his mother in 1847.
His studies
Edgar Degas' background and education would never suggest that he would become a revolutionary, satirizing and reshaping the visual perceptions of the people of his time. In 1845, he entered the Lycée Louis-le-Grand (Paris) as a student, where he met Henri Rouart, a friend who accompanied him throughout his life. At the age of eighteen, in a room of his parents' mansion, he set up a studio where he designed some of the best works of his early career.
He didn't make much progress in school, as he was well aware of his social position, and his parents constantly reminded him that he was an aristocrat. Already with a baccalaureate, he left high school at the age of twenty with other plans in mind.
In 1854, he joined the studio of Louis Lamothe, where he met Dominique Ingres and the Flandrin brothers. It was Lamothe who served as an advisor to him during the first years of his career and who brought him closer to Dominique Ingres. In the following years, Degas was admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
During this period, he entered the studio of the painter Felix José Barrias, who was very famous in his time. Advised by Ingres, who told him "Make sketches, young man, many sketches, no matter whether they come from memory or from nature," he spent his days in the Louvre Museum, fascinated by Italian, Dutch and French painters.
He tirelessly drew copies of the works of Albrecht Dürer, Andrea Mantegna, Paolo Veronese, Goya, and Rembrandt. His father, however, wanted him to study law. Degas enrolled in the law course at the University of Paris in November 1853, but did not make the slightest effort to succeed and continue his studies, finally dropping out in 1855.
In Italy
Enthusiastic, he undertook a trip to Italy, where he lived for three years, devoting himself to copying the paintings of the great Renaissance masters such as Luca Signorelli, Sandro Botticelli, the classical sculptures, Raphael's frescoes, and Michelangelo's work in the Sistine Chapel, works that are the painter's main motivations. Initially, he traveled with his family to Naples and then to Rome and Florence, where he became friends with the painter Gustave Moreau.
He had contact with the works of Rafael Sanzio, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Andrea Mantegna - copying his works, such as "The Crucifixion of Mantegna", among other Renaissance artists.
During this trip, he conceived one of his best works: Portrait of the Bellelli family, with sketches of all the members of the Italian aristocratic family.
Return to Paris and the Impressionists
Back in France in 1859, Degas settled in a studio in Paris and continued his work on the Portrait of the Bellelli family, which took more than two months to be executed and which he wanted to present at the Great Salon of Paris. With this painting, Degas manages to bring out the psychological character of the baroness, who contrasts visibly with that of the baron.
She just stares coldly at a window knowing that she is there only to pose for the portrait. The baron, on the other hand, who is older than his wife, tenderly looks at his seated niece. In addition to this painting, he never tired of portraying members of his family, including his grandfather, Hilaire Germain de Gas, his brothers, and the head of the De Gas family.
He also carried out studies on several historical paintings: Alexander and Bucephalus and Jephthah's daughter in 1859-1860; Semiramis building Babylon in 1860, and Young Spartans around 1860. In 1861, Degas goes to visit his childhood friend Paul Valpinçon in Normandy, where he makes his first studies on horses.
He exhibits for the first time at the Great Salon of Paris in 1865, when the jury accepted his painting War Scene in the Middle Ages, which attracted little attention. However, his participations continued until 1870. He concisely studied the work of Delacroix and of Dominique Ingres.
The latter was, so to speak, "idolized" by Degas. With all this, in 1864, he met a man who would prove to be a great friend and who would mark him until the end of his days: Édouard Manet, French painter, born in 1834 and deceased in 1917, linked to the Impressionism generation. Both were copying the same portrait by Velázquez in the Louvre when they met.
He changed his style, influenced mainly by the example of Édouard Manet. Manet promoted the first Impressionist art exhibition, where Degas showed his work. From 1874 to 1886, Degas exhibited with the Impressionists, but his repeated conflicts with other members of the group and the fact that he had so little in common with Claude Monet and other landscape painters caused him to reject the Impressionist label that the press had created and popularized for him. Even today, his inclusion in Impressionist painting is debated by art historians. Degas appreciated everything that was out of the ordinary.
He shocked by a discordant palette, in the words of the public of the time, in which he was able to put side by side an intense violet and an acid green. His choice of subjects was often unconventional. Influenced by the naturalist aesthetic, he portrayed Parisian life, in its vices, as in The Absinthe (1876-1877), and customs.
The frequency of Paris nightlife, and especially the opera, led him to multiply the angles of view and unusual framings, which later cinema and photography would trivialize. In The Ballerina (1876), Degas expresses the elusive beauty of dance, and in this respect he can be considered to be "impressionistic." Although the ballerina is completely to the right, the composition is asymmetrically balanced by the dark spot of what will be the head of the corps de ballet.
Traditionally, Western art respects unity of composition. Forms appear connected to other forms, creating a movement or a set of lines in space. Eastern art, on the other hand, bases this relationship on the accentuation of certain graphics or colors and taking into account the space "in between", the void. Degas took note of the exhibition of Japanese prints held in Paris in 1860, and assimilated the delicate line of the compositions.
Objects are no longer seen as objects in themselves, to be faithfully portrayed, but are represented by the pictorial qualities they can lend to the whole picture. In the numerous versions of After the Bath, the theme of women doing the toilet is developed. The painter experiments with various technical processes: watercolor, pastel, etching, lithography, monotype. In recent years, due to vision difficulties, he worked almost exclusively with wax, pastel and clay. His palette has gained more strength and luminosity, while the forms have simplified.
The artistic path of Edgar Degas
After his long visit to Italy, where he did not refrain from studying and even copying the works of the most distinguished painters of the Italian Renaissance, Degas returned to Paris.
Enthused by Renaissance and Baroque art, he went frequently to the Louvre Museum, where he studied the works of his predecessor painters from all over Europe, including Nicolas Poussin, Dominique Ingres, Leonardo da Vinci, Hans Memling, Titian, Anthony van Dyck, Joshua Reynolds, Hubert Robert, John Constable, and other masters.
The paintings of this period, copies of or inspired by the works of the previous painters, began to face success and were even accepted into the Salon. Degas was recognized as a conventional and eclectic Parisian Salon painter.
But in 1870, Degas' life changed, due to the Franco-Prussian War. In that war, between two of the greatest European powers - although in decline - Degas served in the National Guard, in the artillery, acting in the defense of Paris. He was there together with Henri Rouart. The two of them stayed in the house of some friends of the De Gas family, named Valpiçon.
It was here, in Ménil-Hubert in Normandy, that Degas worked on Portrait of the young Hortense Valpiçon. The painting reveals an asymmetry similar to The Lady of the Chrysanthemums, which in turn portrays Hortense's mother, the famous Madame Valpiçon. This season marked the aristocrat's increased interest in historical painting.
After the War - and to rest - Degas retired to New Orleans, via London, with his brother René (who had the same name as their father), where his uncle was immigrated and maintained a cotton business.
There he conceived a vast number of works before returning to Paris, including The Cotton Exchange of New Orleans, The Pedicurist (which stands as another of Degas' tireless studies of everyday life) and Cotton merchants in New Orleans. He returned to his hometown in 1873, after staying about five months in the United States.
After so many years devoted to painting, Degas wanted to try a new occupation. Seeing himself in a favorable social position, Degas had access to the most contemporary technologies and fashions. Recently invented, photography also attracted the Frenchman, but only for a short time.
Of conservative opinion, worthy of a true aristocrat, he reinvented himself as an art collector and bought several works by Paul Gauguin, Van Gogh and Paul Cézanne, which demonstrates the aptitude he had for choosing vivid and strong tones and the "force" they exert on him. He then created a collection, today, of immense commercial value.
As has already been explicitly stated, Degas enjoyed great monetary stability. However, he only enjoyed such stability until 1874, when his father died. Having inherited some debts, Degas was forced to sell his art collection. Even so, he didn't neglect his luxuries, including the servants, whom he often portrayed. His housekeeper was Zoé Cloisier.
In 1874, after the death of his father, Degas needed help in putting on an exhibition where he could display his paintings. The exhibition, at first a simple event that was not supposed to attract much attention, turned out to be the First Impressionist Exhibition, where Degas presented himself with works such as At the Races and Riding Horses.
Both works are on display today in museums: the first in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the second in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. Degas and the other Impressionists had seven more exhibitions, the last one in 1886. Degas participated in all of them, without exception. In most of them, Degas was entered there under Manet, his "rival friend".
After these exhibitions, the world had certainly changed. People renewed their view of art and became accustomed to those paintings that "good society" regarded as imprudent, scandalous (those of Édouard Manet), and even immoral, objects that incited revolutions.
And indeed, the Impressionists were indeed revolutionary: they revolutionized the very conservative way of looking at art, changed the naturalistic view people had of the world around them, and took the first step towards Modern Art.
Although Degas, throughout his life, was conservative both in his views and in the way he lived, the transformations he underwent, as with most of the other Impressionists, would indeed become the "lever" of Modernism.
The artistic style
Degas is commonly considered as one of the Impressionists, however, such statement proves to be a mistake, since the author never adopted the impressionists' typical color range, proposed by Monet and Boudin, and moreover, disapproved several of their works.
On the contrary, Degas mixed the impressionist style - inspired by Manet - with conservative influences, based on the Italian Renaissance and French Realism. But, like many modernists - from this time or from others, see Matisse, who lived later - he was greatly inspired by the odalisques of Dominique Ingres.
At the first Impressionist exhibition, Degas was on the list of those who had works exhibited there. His works brought together a wide and unparalleled range of influences, most notably Dominique Ingres' Japanese prints and human turns. As is to be noted, Degas' paintings were not as surprising as Monet's, for example.
The public was not so amazed by his paintings; they were so much more delicate, without the aggressiveness they saw in the other works, it even reminded them of historical painting, the great Italian masters, and the charm of the French of the seventeenth century.
Degas was well known for painting ballerinas, horses, family portraits - of which the best known is Portrait of the Bellelli Family - or individual portraits (e.g. Portrait of Edmond Duranty), scenes of everyday Parisian life and domestic scenes such as bathing (such as The Bathtub), landscapes, and scenes of the New Orleans bourgeoisie.
However, for some time, Degas applied himself to painting the marital tensions, between man and woman (remember The Rape and The Pout).
In the 1860s, Degas finally acquired the style that would make him famous and different from his colleagues: historical painting. Despite this particular, he didn't stop painting the opera and concert scenes, women, and finally, the ballerinas that made him a renowned painter.
Of this series that lasted through the end of his glorious artistic career, the most famous paintings are undoubtedly The First Ballerina and The Dance Class. In these works, the Frenchman applied vividly the vibrant tones that were common throughout his life.
However, during this period his works became very expressive, alarming, frightening. Take the first one. The dancer seems to fly and the environment around her is inspiring and unrelenting. A living picture, an unquestionable masterpiece.
It is impossible to forget Musicians at the Opera, a real scene out of a literary tale. An interesting feature of Degas' painting is that he gives each character in his works a brilliant and eclectic atmosphere, which makes them seem real, moving, touchable, inexplicable. Degas was undeniably a master painter. Musicians of the Opera is no exception to the rule.
Up to this point he often used pastel, but during the 1870s oil painting was more common in his works.
Due to his brilliant technique, today Edgar Degas' paintings are among the most sought after by buyers from all over the world. In 2004, a work by Degas called The Races in the Woods of Boulogne was sold at Sotheby's for an astonishing 10 million Euros, alongside The Tomato Tree by Pablo Picasso and some other works by his eternal "friend-rival" Édouard Manet.
His reputation and the acceptance of his work
"I salute Your Honor who has that perspective, perhaps of the paintings of Degas, capable of glimpsing the horizon without the impressionism that often hinders the exercise of poetry for the good application of justice." Minister Menezes Direito - STF
Degas was an aristocrat, a man from typical families, a descendant of Neapolitan bankers. Therefore, his works, from the beginning of his career, were well accepted by the critics and the remaining aristocracy that was amazed to see the talent of that genius.
Undoubtedly, his social class influenced the acceptance of his works. From everyday domestic scenes to the frenetic streets of Paris, from the New Orleans Stock Exchange to historical painting, from horse racing to women ironing, all his works were well accepted and highly reputable.
However, this was to change after the conception of Place de La Concorde. Whereas in his earlier paintings they appear quite dynamically, the composition of this one did not allow for this. The figures move, apparently, slowly - which is obvious, since it represented a promenade.
There is an almost absence of characters in the Parisian square. There are two girls who it is not clear who they belong to, where they come from, or where they are going. They demonstrate an implacable, awkward smile, comparable to that of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa.
Two sad-faced old men, wandering around with top hat on, and beard arranged, very eclectic. They look miserable. And this sad atmosphere is further enhanced by the costumes of the characters, gray or black.
It is not known for sure how people reacted to the painting, but it is known that they were eternalized in the expressions of weariness in the audience. They looked sad when they saw the work. Degas was no longer the same.
The Little Ballerina
And after The Little Ballerina of Fourteen, Degas marks the beginning of his independence from the group of Impressionists. He leaves them behind. That, for him, was only a joke, with which he became recognized in Europe.
By exhibiting this sculpture, he shocked his colleagues, as well as the entire "good society" of the time. The dancer represented was an opera dancer that Degas had known.
Her family was miserable, and she even had a prostitute sister. After Degas sculpted her, she even studied ballet, until she was sixteen, but ended up prostituting herself to make ends meet. In the sculpture, the marks of the misery in which thousands of Parisians lived are clearly marked on the ballerina's face.
The first version of The Little Ballerina at 14 was presented at the VI Impressionist Exhibition, in 1881, immediately causing reactions of surprise and scandal: "Refined and barbaric at the same time, with her ingenious dress and her throbbing colored flesh, furrowed by the work of her muscles, this statue is the only attempt at a true modernization of sculpture that I know of," wrote Joris-Karl Huysmans.
What triggered the criticism were, above all, moral rather than aesthetic considerations. The hollow, mummified face of Marie Van Goethem, the teenage Belgian Opera student who had served as a model, seemed to Mantz, for example, "of bestial effrontery"; to Trianon it was "a model of horror and bestiality"; to Jules Claretie "the vicious face of that young girl who had just gone through puberty, a little street flower, remains unforgettable."
The physiognomy, which to many seemed simian and ugly, was compared to that of a zoo or anthropological museum specimen - to which the presence of real hair, the fabric mixed with wax, and the translucent, hyper-realistic limbs contributed greatly in the first wax version.
The idea of dressing his sculpture in cloth clothes and adding natural hair had, however, several precedents, of which Degas was certainly aware: the wax statues at Madame Tussauds in London; the wax mannequins in the ethnographic exhibitions of the time; the "panoramas," that is, sets that reconstructed the Franco-Prussian Wars;
the Catholic sculptures of Spain (where Degas had been traveling) and the Neapolitan crib statuettes, which the sculptor had most certainly seen in Naples, the city where he had lived for a long time, with his grandfather, who owned a bank there.