Edgar Degas

Life

Style & Innovation

Degas's revolutionary achievement lies in "the invention of a modern way of seeing." He brought into painting the daring compositions he had learned from photography and from Japanese ukiyo-e prints. He boldly cropped figures at the edges of the picture, tilted his viewpoint to look down obliquely from above, and let empty floors or stages cut diagonally across the canvas, creating the illusion of a "moment caught by chance"—when in fact it was meticulously constructed from dozens of drawings and from memory. "Art is not spontaneous," he declared; "it must be the most calculated of things." In this exhibition's seven-section narrative, Degas represents Section 2, "Impressionism," alongside Renoir, Monet, Pissarro, and Sisley—yet he stands apart in that he did not follow Impressionism's central tenet of painting light directly out of doors (plein air). He scorned working from nature outdoors (it is said he joked that he would post a special police force to keep watch over painters who painted landscapes), and rather than light itself he focused on the forms and movement created by artificial light (the gaslit illumination of the stage) and, above all, on line. His protest—"I do nothing but paint the result of studying and reflecting on the old masters; of spontaneity I know nothing at all"—shows that Impressionism was not a single style but an alliance of diverse personalities. He was revolutionary in subject matter as well. Instead of heroes and myths, he painted "unobserved moments": the weary rest of ballet dancers, the yawn of a laundress, the unguarded gesture of a woman in her bath. Dancers occupy the largest place in his work—not as traditional portraits but as studies of the body's movement and physical discipline. The bathing-women series in particular has been described as seen "as if through a keyhole," raising the question of the gaze. Innovation in medium is another of his core achievements. He elevated pastel from a mere sketching tool to a full-fledged painting medium, building it up in layers, fixing it, and scraping it back to draw out a depth rivaling that of oil. He also experimented extensively with monotype (a print drawn on a plate and pulled in only one or two impressions), guided by his friend Ludovic-Napoléon Lepic, and through a mixed technique of working pastel over the printed impression he created new effects of light and dark. This experimental spirit runs broadly forward, from Toulouse-Lautrec to later abstraction.

Technique

When you see Degas's work in person, look first at "the physicality of the medium." In his early oils he favored the "essence" technique—blotting the oil out of his paint with absorbent paper and thinning the pigment with turpentine, then applying it quickly to paper or canvas to make a matte, flat, drawing-like surface. The fact that the DIA's "Violinist and Young Woman" (c. 1871) is recorded with the medium "oil and crayon" reflects this hybrid of drawing and painting. As a result, the early works have almost no impasto, the brushwork looks like a colored drawing, and the contour line is alive—standing before the canvas, notice how crisply the figures' outlines are "drawn," and how thinly and unfinished the backgrounds are handled. In the pastels the surface is something else entirely. After mastering pastel in the late 1870s, Degas would lay down several layers of dry pastel, spray fixative, and then paint over it again, repeating the process. So up close you can see that the colors are not single tones but powders of complementary hues tangled together and mixing optically (for example, streaks of pink, green, and blue hidden within the white of a dancer's skirt); some passages are left rough enough that the paper shows through, while others are rubbed in thickly to a velvety depth. Viewed at a raking angle, the texture of the pastel powder and the scraped marks (sgraffito) reveal themselves. In his later years he often drew on tracing paper and joined several sheets together to extend the picture (the DIA's "After the Bath" is tan tracing paper fully mounted on cardboard, and "Dancers in Repose" is thin wove paper fully mounted to a support), so look for the seams that can be visible along the edges. In conservation terms, Degas's pastel-fixing technique is often cited as a "mystery" whose exact recipe has never been clearly identified; infrared and technical examination frequently reveal traces of tracing used to transfer contours as he reused the same dancer poses, as well as pentimenti showing repeated revisions of the composition (shifted arm positions, extensions of the picture). In sculpture he improvised forms in wax and clay built around cork and wire armatures, and these were cast in bronze after his death—the real fabric ballet costume and genuine hair ribbon of the "Little Dancer Aged Fourteen" were a pioneering instance of the "mixed media" that astonished audiences of the day.

Key Works

Behind the Canvas

Connections

In Section 2, "Impressionism," of this exhibition, Degas is placed alongside Renoir, Monet, Pissarro, and Sisley, yet he stands in sharp contrast to them in having rejected working from nature outdoors and held instead to interiors, artificial light, and drawing—a key figure who reveals "the diversity of Impressionism" within a single show. The tradition of Ingres's "line," carried down through his teacher Lamothe, forms a counterpole to Matisse, who liberated color (Section 5), and to Picasso, who dismantled form (Section 6), in the same exhibition, exposing the art-historical axis of "line versus color." Meanwhile his photographic cropping, high viewpoints, and Japanese-print flatness become a bridge to the later Toulouse-Lautrec, and to the current that made pictorial composition itself autonomous (Kandinsky's abstraction in Section 7). His friendship with Manet (whom he met copying in the Louvre in the mid-1860s) was the decisive impetus that turned him from history painting toward modern urban life, and his exchanges with Mary Cassatt show the network within the Impressionist group. Just as Cézanne and Van Gogh in the Post-Impressionism section moved beyond Impressionism through "structure" and "emotion," Degas can be read as one who transformed Impressionism from within through "drawing and composition." Moreover, the fact that his "Violinist and Young Woman" (70.167) came to the DIA through the Robert Hudson Tannahill bequest in 1970 lets us see concretely how large a role the Tannahill Collection plays in supporting this entire exhibition.

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