Waldemar Januszczak TV - Tim Marlow TV - Edgar Degas - Kenneth Clark TV - Fake or Fortune? TV - Degas: Passion for Perfection TV -
This is Degas’s first masterpiece; he started painting it in his early twenties ... They are all members of the Degas family ... This here – Degas himself – arrogant, surly, misogynist. Waldemar Januszczak, The Impressionists III: Painting and Revolution: Painting The People, BBC 2011
He looks down at the girls from extravagant 3-D viewpoints that art had never chosen before. (Artists: Degas & Ballet) ibid.
Degas’ most intense examination of women – his most productive voyeurism – took place not in a bathtub or in Sparta but from a box in the theatre from where he loved to watch the ballet. (Artists: Degas & Ballet) ibid.
Edgar Degas is widely celebrated as a pioneering French Impressionist and the first great painter of beautiful ballerinas. Tim Marlow on Degas and the Ballet
Degas was a deeper, darker, more complex and more technologically aware artist than many previously realised. ibid.
The Royal Academy’s exhibition traces Degas’ creative obsession with ballet throughout his career. ibid.
A leader of the first great radical movement in modern art. ibid.
The only finished sculpture that Degas ever exhibited: The Little Dancer Aged Fourteen 1880-1881 cast c.1922. ibid.
Three Danvers (Blue Skirts, Red Bodices) c.1903: That kind of creative energy you’ve seen in the Russian pictures I think in some ways is seen in these late ballet pictures too. ibid.
The first great artist to be obsessed with the ballet. ibid.
Art is vice. You don’t marry it legitimately, you rape it. Edgar Degas
Painting is easy when you don’t know how, but very difficult when you do. Edgar Degas
Art is not what you see, but what you make others see. Edgar Degas
It is all very well to copy what one sees, but it is far better to draw what one now only sees in one’s memory. That is a transformation in which imagination collaborates with memory. Edgar Degas
Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things. Edgar Degas
No art is less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and the study of the great masters. Edgar Degas
A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, and some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people. Edgar Degas
Art critic! Is that a profession? When I think we are stupid enough, we painters, to solicit those people’s compliments and to put ourselves into their hands! What shame! Should we even accept that they talk about our work? Edgar Degas, Degas by Himself
To anyone who is not an artist it must seem rather strange that Degas who could do anything – for whom setting down what he saw presented no difficulties at all – should have continued to draw the same poses year after year – often, it would seem, with increasing difficulty. Just as a classical dancer repeats the same movements again and again, in order to achieve a greater perfection of line and balance, so Degas repeats the same motifs, it was one of the things that gave him so much sympathy with dancers. He was continually struggling to achieve an idea of perfect form, but this did not prevent him looking for the truth in what might seem an artificial situation. Kenneth Clark, The Romantic Rebellion 1973
A painting that has had a question mark over it for decades … It certainly looks like a Degas: one of his dancers. Fake or Fortune? s2e1: Degas and the Little Dancer, BBC 2012
1880s: Degas was frequently attending ballet performances. ibid.
‘There are some serious queries as well … The signature goes very woolly after the ‘D’ … Concerned both about the draughtsmanship, the construction of it … [and] the face.’ ibid. expert
An authentic work by Degas. ibid.
Hilaire-Germain-Edgar de Gas, born 19 July 1834 Paris. Degas: Passion for Perfection, Sky Arts 2020
What makes Degas fascinating and really very alive to a 21st century audience is that he is more interested in process than in the end result. Jane Munro, curator and keeper of paintings, The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
You can see the intellectual understanding that underpins his work, particularly his curiosity for the work of earlier ages. ibid. Tim Knox, director The Fitzwilliam Museum
Make portraits of people in typical familiar poses, being sure to give above all their faces the same kind of expression as their bodies. ibid. Degas
The Cotton Office in New Orleans was exhibited in the second Impressionist Exhibition of 1876, and was the first painting by the artist to enter the French Public Collection. ibid.
I can get along very well without even going out of my own house. With a bowl of soup and three old brushes, you can make the finest landscape ever painted. (Art & House) ibid. Degas: An Intimate Portrait by Ambroise Vollard