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BIOGRAPHY
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His Portraiture
Portraiture was more important for Degas than for any of the other Impressionists. Some of his portraits are among the best produced in Western art since the Renaissance, and many reveal his profound understanding of human nature. In the "Belleli Family" (1859) [view the image on an external site], a group portrait executed in Naples of his aunt, her husband, and their two daughters, Degas caught the divisions within a family. Belleli's emotional separation from his wife is suggested by his pose and by his physical isolation within the room, as he sits cramped at a fireplace, with his back to the viewer. One of the daughters repeats the triangular form of her mother, who shields her, while the other, shown in a more unstable pose, seems to be divided in her loyalties. Among Degas' other portraits are the very soft "Head of a Young Woman" (1867), "Diego Martelli" (1879), and "Estelle Musson" (1872-1873), the blind wife of Degas' brother René, in which the silver and rose tones bring into relief the remote tenderness of the sitter.
Depiction of the Modern Scene
By 1870 Degas had abandoned his desire to become a history painter, and he drew his characters instead from the contemporary Parisian scene. While the bourgeois fashionable world of the ballet, theater, and racetrack interested him considerably, he sometimes depicted squalid scenes of dissipation, as in "Absinthe" (1876). Degas was especially attracted by the spectacle of the ballet with its elegance of costume and scenery, its movement which was at once spontaneous and restrained, its artificial lighting, and its unusual viewpoints. Usually he depicted the ballerinas off guard, showing them backstage at an awkward moment as they fasten a slipper or droop exhausted after a difficult practice session. He seems to have tried deliberately to strip his dancers of their glamour, to show them without artifice.
On the surface Degas, operating in this candid-camera fashion, fits easily within the confines of Impressionism as an art of immediacy and spontaneity. But these scenes of contemporary Parisian life are not at all haphazardly composed: the placement of each detail is calculated in terms of every other to establish balances which are remarkably clever and subtle and which are frequently grasped by the viewer only after considerable study. In "Dancers Practicing at the Bar" (1877) [view the image on an external site] the perspective of the floorboards is so adjusted and the angle of vision so calculated that a resin shaker at the left of the canvas is able to balance in interest and compositional force the two dancers almost completely to the right of center.
Degas conceived of the human figure as operating within an environmental context, to be manipulated as a prop according to the dictates of greater compositional interest. Eccentricities of poses and cuttings of the figures, which were inspired to a degree by Japanese prints, do not occur accidently in his paintings. In "A Carriage at the Races" (1873) [view the image on an external site] the figure in the carriage to the left is cut nearly down the middle. Had Degas shown more of this figure, an obvious and uninteresting symmetry would have been set up with the larger carriage in the right foreground.
Source: ENCYCLOPEDIA OF WORLD BIOGRAPHY, 2nd ed. 17 Vols. Gale Research, 1998.
Top banner photos: Re-creating a Degas charcoal drawing; Degas' painting "The School of Ballet," c. 1873 (The Corcoran Art Gallery); Peter Badger portrays Degas painting the "Frieze of Dancers." |
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Detail of "Green Dancer," c. 1880. (Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY) |
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A re-creation of Edgar Degas sculpting the only sculpture he ever exhibited in public, "Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen." |
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This program is available on VHS and DVD. |
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