Edgar Degas

Edgar Degas: Nothing Should Look Like Chance

In 1881 Degas exhibited a two-thirds-life-size wax girl in a glass case. *The Little Dancer of Fourteen Years* had real hair and a real cloth tutu, and she was modelled on Marie van Goethem, an actual student at the Paris Opera ballet school. Visitors recoiled. Critics called her appallingly ugly. J.-K. Huysmans, who understood what he was seeing, wrote that "the terrible reality of this statuette evidently produces uneasiness in the spectators" and that "Monsieur Degas has revolutionized the traditions of sculpture as he has long since shaken the conventions of painting." It was the only sculpture Degas ever showed in public. The other hundred and fifty were found in his studio after he died.

Banking Money and a Creole Mother

Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas was born in Paris on 19 July 1834 — he simplified the name himself in adulthood. His father Augustin was a banker; his mother Célestine Musson was a Creole from New Orleans, daughter of a man born in Port-au-Prince who had settled in Louisiana in 1810. She died when Edgar was thirteen. The money mattered: the Metropolitan Museum of Art describes him as the scion of a wealthy banking family whose father spotted his talent early and took him regularly to the museums of Paris.

He went to the Lycée Louis-le-Grand at eleven and left in 1853 with a baccalaureate in literature and a grounding in Latin, Greek and ancient history. That November he enrolled in law at the University of Paris to please his father, and applied himself to it as little as possible.

Ingres's Instruction

In 1855 he met Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, then the living embodiment of French classical draughtsmanship, who gave him one piece of advice he obeyed for sixty years: "Draw lines, young man, and still more lines, both from life and from memory, and you will become a good artist." He entered the École des Beaux-Arts the same year and studied drawing under Louis Lamothe, an Ingres disciple whose studio, in the Met's summary, insisted on "line and its insistence on the crucial importance of draftsmanship."

In July 1856 he left for Italy and stayed three years, mostly in Naples with his aunt's family, beginning studies for *The Bellelli Family* and copying Michelangelo, Raphael and Titian. His copying method already reveals the man: rather than reproduce whole compositions he extracted details — a secondary figure, a single head — and treated each as a work in its own right.

The Turn to the Present

Back in France he did what an ambitious academic painter was supposed to do and produced history paintings: *The Daughter of Jephthah*, *Sémiramis Building Babylon*, *Young Spartans Exercising*. He debuted at the Salon in 1865 with *Scene of War in the Middle Ages*, which nobody noticed. He never made another. By 1866, with *Scene from the Steeplechase: The Fallen Jockey*, he had turned to contemporary subjects — a shift encouraged by his friendship with Manet, whom he reportedly met in 1864 while both were copying a Velázquez in the Louvre.

When the Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870 he joined the National Guard, and during rifle training discovered that his eyesight was defective. It would define the rest of his working life. Afterwards he spent 1872–73 in New Orleans with his uncle Michel Musson on Esplanade Avenue, producing *A Cotton Office in New Orleans* (1873) — the only painting a museum bought from him in his lifetime.

1874: Ruin, and the Best Decade

His father died in 1874 and Degas learned that his brother René had run up enormous business debts. To protect the family name he sold his house and his inherited art collection to settle them. For the first time at forty he had to live on what he sold, and the decade that followed produced most of his greatest work — a fact worth sitting with, since it complicates every romantic account of what artists need.

Between 1874 and 1886 the independents mounted eight exhibitions and Degas showed in all but one, organising many of them. He also rejected the name. He preferred "Realist" or "Independent," mocked his colleagues for painting outdoors, and never once worked *en plein air* himself, always indoors from memory, photographs or models. "No art was ever less spontaneous than mine," he said. "What I do is the result of reflection and of the study of the great masters; of inspiration, spontaneity, temperament, I know nothing." He was socially conservative, hated the publicity, and insisted on admitting non-Impressionists like Forain and Raffaëlli — a stubbornness that helped break the group up in 1886.

The Dancers

More than half his output shows dancers; the Met puts the figure near 1,500 works. They are not portraits and rarely performances. They are rehearsals, waiting, adjusting a shoe, being corrected — studies, as the Met has it, of "the physicality and discipline" of a body at work. He painted laundresses and milliners and racehorses and, later, women bathing entirely without self-consciousness and emphatically not posed. He also painted the ballet because it sold, which is why the subject expanded after 1874.

His compositions came substantially from Japanese prints: radical cropping, asymmetry, figures sliced by the frame, viewpoints from above or from the wings. Before 1880 he worked mainly in oil from pencil and pastel studies; after 1875 pastel took over, and by 1885 most of his important works were pastels, built up with hatching, wet and dry, gouache and watercolour mixed in.

Wax, Monotype, and a Camera

The Met notes his "lively, scientific interest in a wide range of media, including engraving, monotype, and photography." He made roughly 300 monotypes and habitually reworked the prints in pastel. In the late 1880s he took up photography, shooting friends by lamplight and using pictures of dancers and nudes as reference. As his sight failed he moved toward sculpture, working the wax by touch. He was still making pastels in late 1907 and sculpture around 1910, and stopped in 1912 when his studio on the rue Victor Massé, his home for over twenty years, was condemned. After his death his heirs found about 150 waxes, many crumbling; the founder Adrien Hébrard judged 74 castable, and the bronzes were produced between 1919 and 1936.

The Curmudgeon and the Anti-Dreyfusard

"The artist must live alone," Degas held, "and his private life must remain unknown." He never married. George Moore called him an old curmudgeon; Renoir was blunter: "What a creature he was, that Degas! All his friends had to leave him; I was one of the last to go, but even I couldn't stay till the end."

The worst of it is not eccentricity. Degas once dismissed a model on discovering she was Protestant. His 1879 *Portraits at the Stock Exchange* is regarded by modern scholars as antisemitic. During the Dreyfus Affair he severed relations with every Jewish friend he had, publicly repudiated old friendships with Jewish artists, and refused models he suspected were Jewish. He remained an outspoken antisemite and anti-Dreyfusard until he died, nearly blind, on 27 September 1917, having spent his last years walking the streets of Paris.

Why Edgar Is Called a Genius

Degas himself supplied the terms. "In art, nothing should look like chance, not even movement." That sentence is the whole claim. The hardest technical problem in his work is that a body caught mid-motion looks accidental, and an accidental-looking picture is usually just a badly composed one; Degas produced images that appear snatched at random — a dancer half out of frame, a jockey falling, a woman bent over a tub with her face hidden — which are in fact the most rigorously calculated compositions of their century. He achieved this without ever watching the moment he painted. He worked from memory and study, indoors, deliberately, describing his pictures as prepared, calculated, practised, developed in stages. The cognitive quality is a kind of reverse engineering: knowing precisely which asymmetries, croppings and steep perspectives will read to the eye as spontaneity, and then constructing them. Huysmans's response to the *Little Dancer* is the clearest contemporary testimony that people knew they were seeing something structurally new.

The counter-case has several parts. Much of the dancer corpus is commercially driven repetition; fifteen hundred variations on one motif include a great many that add nothing. He founded nothing and taught no pupils formally, and while Sickert, Cassatt and above all Toulouse-Lautrec learned from him, the innovation the era is actually named for — painting light outdoors — he ridiculed. A defensible reading is that his gift was fundamentally that of a supreme draughtsman, Ingres's instruction executed for sixty years, rather than of a conceptual originator; the intelligence is in the hand and the compositional eye. And his moral record is squalid enough that his admirers have spent a century arguing about how much it should cost him.

Legacy

The strangest thing about Degas is how much of him was posthumous. The sculptures the world knows were never meant to be seen; the bronzes were cast by other hands after he was dead, and their status is still argued over. What survives without qualification is the compositional grammar — the cropped frame, the off-centre subject, the view from the wings — which passed through Toulouse-Lautrec into poster design, and from there into photography and cinema, where it has been the default way of framing a moving body ever since.

Achievements

• Notable work: Count Lepic and His Daughters
• Notable work: After a Bath. Woman Drying the Back of her Neck.
• Notable work: Young Spartans Exercising
• Notable work: The Ballet Class
• Movement: Impressionism