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Edgar Degas Essay, Research Paper

EDGAR DEGAS

(1834-1917)

“…Aspects of Degas’s work – mainly, his ballet paintings from the 1880S – have long been popular with a broad audience; too much so for their own good. But he has never been a “popular” artist like the wholly inferior Auguste Renoir, whose Paris-Boston retrospective in 1985 beguiled the crowds and bored everyone else. Degas was much harder to take, with his spiny intelligence (never Renoir’s problem), his puzzling mixtures of categories, his unconventional cropping and, above all, his “coldness” – that icy, precise objectivity which was one of the masks of his unrelenting power of aesthetic deliberation. Besides, the long continuities of his work have not always been obvious. The figure you think he skimmed from the street like a Kodak turns out to have been there already, in Ingres or Watteau or some half-forgotten seventeenth-century draftsman who suited his purposes. Degas was the most modern of artists, but his kind of modernity, which entailed a passionate working relationship with the remote as well as the recent past, hardly exists today. How we would have bored him, with our feeble jabber of postmodernist “appropriation”!

“In his late years Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas was chatting in his studio with one of his few friends and many admirers, English painter Walter Richard Sickert. They decided to visit a caf . Young Sickert got ready to summon a fiacre, a horse-drawn cab. Degas objected. “Personally, I don’t like cabs. You don’t see anyone. That’s why I love to ride on the omnibus-you can look at people. We were created to look at one another, weren’t we?”

“No passing remark could take you closer to the heart of nineteenth-century Realism: the idea of the artist as an engine for looking, a being whose destiny was to study what Balzac, in a title that declared its rebellion from the theological order of Dante’s Divine Comedy, called La Com die Humaine.

“The idea that the goal of creative effort lay outside the field of allegory and moral precept was quite new in the 1860s when Degas was coming to maturity as a painter. The highest art was still history painting, in which France had reigned supreme; but since 1855 practically the whole generation of history painters on whom this elevation depended – Paul Delaroche, Ary Scheffer, Horace Vernet and, above all, Eug ne Delacroix and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres – had died, and no one seemed fit to replace them. French critics and artists alike, and conservative ones in particular, felt a tremor of crisis, as others would a century later as the masters of modernism died off. After them, what could sustain the momentum of culture? “His presence among us was a guarantee, his life a safeguard,” ran Ingres’s obituary in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts in 1867.

“And yet beyond the ruins of the temple, something else was stirring: a sense of the century as unique in itself, full of what Charles Baudelaire called the “heroism of modern life.” Its chief bearers, in painting, were to be +douard Manet and Edgar Degas.

“Born in 1834 into a rich Franco-Italian banking family with branches in Paris, Naples and New Orleans, Degas was never short of money and never doubted his vocation as a painter, in which his family encouraged him. He was a shy, insecure, aloof young man – if one did not know this from the testimony of his friends, one would gather it from his early self-portraits, with their veiled look of mannerist inwardness acquired from Pontormo – and, it seems, unusually devoid of narcissism: unlike almost every nineteenth-century painter one has heard of, he gave up painting his own face at thirty-one. It was the Other that fascinated him: all faces except his own.

“In time he would construct a formidable “character” to mask his shyness: Degas the solitary, the feared aphorist, the Great Bear of Paris. He never married – “I would have been in mortal misery all my life for fear my wife might say, ‘That’s a pretty little thing,’ after I had finished a picture.” Certainly he was not homosexual. The more likely guess is that he was impotent. If so, all the luckier for art: his libido and curiosity were channeled through his eyes.

“He had a reputation for misogyny, mainly because he rejected the hypocrisy about formal beauty embedded in the depilated Salon nudes of Bouguereau and Cabanel – ideal wax with little rosy nipples. “Why do you paint women so ugly, Monsieur Degas?” some hostess unwisely asked him. “Parce que la femme en general est laide, madame, ” growled the old terror: “Because, madam, women in general are ugly.”

“This was a blague. To find Degas’s true feelings about women, one should consult the pastels and oil paintings of nudes that he made, at the height of his powers, in the 1880s and 1890s. Some critics still find them “clinical,” because they seem to be done from a point outside the model’s awareness, as though she did not know he was there and were not, actually, posing. “I want to look through the keyhole,” Degas said. The bathers were “like cats licking themselves.” Their bodies are radiant, worked and reworked almost to a thick crust of pastel, mat and blooming with myriad strokes within their tough winding contours. But they are also mechanisms of flesh and bone, all joints, protuberances, hollows, neither “personalities” nor pinups. (One sees why Duchamp, inventor of the mechanical bride, adored and copied Degas.) Not even Nude Woman Having Her Hair Combed, 1886-88, the most refined and classical of these nudes, seems in the least Renoiresque, although nothing could be more consummately appealing than that pink, slightly blockish body against the gold couch and the regulating white planes of peignoir and apron. It was a subject to which Degas

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