Degas

One of my Lola Tessie's favorite artists was Degas. When I see Degas' ballerinas, I am reminded of my grandmother's gracefulness, artistry, and passion.

Exploring Degas...

After halfheartedly studying law to please his upper-middle-class parents, Edgar Degas enrolled at the venerable École des Beaux-Arts, the official French arts academy. In the classroom, at the Louvre and on trips abroad, the young Degas continued the standard course of study, copying Italian Old Masters and French classical art. During these years, he developed a superb command of drawing, a fundamental skill that lay at the heart of his 60-year career. This drawing is an exquisite example of his draftsmanship: swift, confident strokes of black charcoal define the position of the dancer, and wisps of white and yellow pastel emphasize both volume and light. Although the work was chosen by the artist as one of the 20 most important examples of his drawing through 1896, the grid lines remind us that it was originally intended as a study. Variants of this figure can be found in at least four of his canvases.

In 1853 at the age of 18, Degas received permission to "copy" at the Louvre in Paris. (During the 19th century, aspiring artists developed their technique by attempting to replicate the works of the masters.) Degas produced several impressive copies of Raphael as well as studying the work of more contemporary painters such as Ingres and Delacroix. In 1855 he gained admission into the Ecole Des Beaux-Art in Paris. However, after only one year of study, Degas left school to spend three years traveling, painting and studying in Italy. He painted painstaking copies of the works of the great Italian renaissance painters Michelangelo and da Vinci, developing a reverence for classical linearity that remained a distinguishing feature of even his most modern paintings.


The ballerinas Degas bequeathed to us remain among the most popular images in 19th-century art. The current exhibition is a reminder of just how daring the artist was in creating them. He cropped his pictures as a photographer would (and also became one); he defied traditional composition, opting for asymmetry and radical viewpoints; and he rubbed pastels over his monotype (or one-of-a-kind) prints, creating dramatic effects. Yet he always managed to keep an eye on the great masters of the past. His younger friend, the poet Paul Valéry, described him as “divided against himself; on the one hand driven by an acute preoccupation with truth, eager for all the newly introduced and more or less felicitous ways of seeing things and of painting them; on the other hand possessed by a rigorous spirit of classicism, to whose principles of elegance, simplicity and style he devoted a lifetime of analysis.”