She comes back twice a day to know if one has seen, if one has written. And she wants it done at once. Unlike his brother Achille, who had an affair with a ballerina, Degas seems to have remained chaste and was, in the view of many, a misogynist.
Later in life Degas gained a reputation as a recluse, even a misanthrope. This was partly because his eyesight began failing in the s, a problem that often depressed him.
But his biting wit helped to isolate him as well. He would make repeated tracings from his drawings as a way of correcting them, recalled Vollard. When a friend taught him how to make a monotype print by drawing on an inked plate that was then run through a press, Degas at once did something unexpected. After making one print, he quickly made a second, faded impression from the leftover ink on the plate, then worked with pastels and gouache over this ghostly image.
The result was an instant success—a collector bought the work, The Ballet Master, on the advice of Mary Cassatt. More important, this technique gave Degas a new way to depict the artificial light of the stage. The soft colors of his pastels took on a striking luminosity when laid over the harsher black-and-white contrasts of the underlying ink. Lazare by Monet and the large, sun-speckled group portrait at the Moulin de la Galette by Renoir.
During the last 20 years of his career, Degas worked in a large fifth-floor studio in lower Montmartre above his living quarters and a private museum for his own art collection. The room was pell-mell—with a basin, a dull zinc bathtub, stale bathrobes, a dancer modeled in wax with a real gauze tutu in a glass case, and easels loaded with charcoal sketches. When it was first shown, at the sixth Impressionist exhibition in , the work was adorned with a real costume and hair. The sculpture was cast in bronze some 28 are now known to exist only after his death in , at age She was one of three sisters, all training to become ballerinas, and all apparently sketched by Degas.
His interest in ballet dancers intensified in the s, and eventually he produced approximately 1, works on the subject. These are not traditional portraits, but studies that address the movement of the human body, exploring the physicality and discipline of the dancers through the use of contorted postures and unexpected vantage points. In Dancer Adjusting Her Slipper ; Degas absorbed artistic tradition and outside influences and reinterpreted them in innovative ways.
Following the opening of trade with Japan in , many French artists, including Degas, were increasingly influenced by Japanese prints. But whereas his contemporaries often infused their paintings with Eastern imagery , Degas abstracted from these prints their inventive compositions and points of view, particularly in his use of cropping and asymmetry. Degas had also observed how sixteenth-century Italian Mannerists similarly framed their subjects, sometimes cutting off part of a figure.
In her subdued attire she seems almost incidental to the riot of color that makes up the central floral arrangement. Even in a more traditional work of portraiture like the Duchessa di Montejasi with Her Daughters, Elena and Camilla ca. Degas had a lively, scientific interest in a wide range of media, including engraving , monotype , and photography.
Before , he generally used oils for his completed works But after , he began using pastels more frequently, even in finished works, such as Portraits at the Stock Exchange ca. By , most of his more important works were done in pastel. He submitted a suite of nudes, all rendered in pastel, to the final Impressionist exhibition in ; among these was Woman Bathing in a Shallow Tub ; The figures in these pastels were criticized for their ungainly poses, as in this work, in which the figure squats awkwardly in a tub, yet the steep perspective gives the work a solid, sculptural balance.
Degas experimented with an array of techniques, breaking up surface textures with hatching, contrasting dry pastel with wet, and using gouache and watercolors to soften the contours of his figures.
In Race Horses ca. The immediacy of the moment is captured in the raised leg of the horse in the foreground and the foreshortened, angled approach of the vigorous horse in the background. The Singer in Green ca.
Evidence of this can be found in seminal works such as Foyer de la Danse , Musicians in the Orchestra and A Carriage at the Races Each of these pictures also exemplify how Degas assumed unconventional points-of-view, suggesting the perspective of a distracted spectator. Yet unlike contemporaries like Renoir and Monet , Degas was not a plein air painter, preferring instead the light and reliability of the studio.
Incidentally, his few outdoor scenes were produced from memory, or conjured in part from his imagination. During this trip, he produced a number of important paintings, including A Cotton Office in New Orleans , the only one of his works to be purchased by a museum in his lifetime. Despite this association, Degas always held the other members at arm's length.
He admired their work and shared many of their ideals, but he never entirely adhered to their philosophy. Nevertheless, he showed work in all but one Impressionist group show, including the final exhibition. As well, he single-handedly recruited more artists to exhibit at these shows than any other member.
Degas remained a bachelor throughout his life, and had few, if any, romantic entanglements. This has fueled speculation about the rationale for his unusual and generally unflattering images of women. His intent may have been to suggest the figures caught off-guard, though feminist critics have pointed out that the effect is often degrading.
Any male painter, who spends so much time famously depicting the female form is bound to receive his share of criticism - and the same hold true for a female that abstracts the nude male. In fact, there is much to consider regarding his treatment of the female subject in his work, much of this and the below is wonderfully discussed in an essay on Degas by the writer and art critic Julian Barnes.
For example, the detractors include the poet Tom Paulin who in said "in this exhibition are women in contorted poses They're like performing animals, they're like animals in the zoo.
In Degas's case, one sitter reported that "He's a strange gentleman - he spends the whole four hours of the sitting combing my hair". That particular sitter was complaining. Upon significant study of the hundreds of depictions women dancing, washing, brushing their hair by Degas, an observer may well realize the painter in a more gentle light. As the 19 th century came to a close, Degas's pace of work waned, and he began spending more time collecting the works of other artists he admired.
Late works, like the bronze Woman Rubbing Her Back with a Sponge , is a testament to Degas's continued devotion to capturing the female form.
0コメント