Why the bohemians of Paris were afraid of the wit of Edgar Degas, and the models considered the artist crazy

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

In the history of French art, there is hardly an artist with incredible wit, literary talent and incredible artistic skill in one bottle, more than Edgar Degas, a painter who became a symbol of the Impressionist era. And about his nasty, sometimes unbearable character, there were legends in Paris.

Edgar Degas was the firstborn, born in 1834, into a wealthy aristocratic family, which later had four children. At the age of 13, Edgar lost his mother. And the father, Auguste de Ha, the manager of the French branch of a large bank, by all means, wanted to give his children a good education. He pinned his highest hopes on the elder Edgar, dreaming that he would become a lawyer.

The son, of course, did not become a lawyer, due to his character and passion for painting, he became a world famous artist. Moreover, in his youth, under the influence of new democratic ideas, Edgar changed his surname from de Ha to the less "aristocratic" Degas. It was these ideas that prompted Edgar in 1870 to volunteer for the Franco-Prussian war. Initially, a patriotic young man who passionately wanted to serve his homeland, later received only disappointment and loss of health. The only thing I got in return was a lot of friends.

The artist was so original and charismatic that legends circulated about him during his lifetime, anecdotes were formed, his personality was fanned by rumors and various kinds of speculation. And all because the artist led a secretive lifestyle. He could not stand newspapermen, and in conversations with friends he was very careful. It was not given to everyone to get to his home or workshop. And despite all that, for all that, many themselves were afraid to fall on his sharp tongue. He did not "spare" either enemies or friends, making sharp jokes about them. And with people who were indifferent to the artist, he was just coldly polite. All the bohemians of Paris knew and feared Edgar Degas, who has an amazing wit and great talent as an artist, not only brush, but also words, as well as the most nasty character.

His amazing skill in mastering the technique of pastels was envied by painters, and his ability to master words - by writers. For example, the French poet Paul Valéry was convinced that if it was possible to collect all the letters of Edgar Degas into a book, it could become an amazing read about art, about life, about the painter himself and those around him.

Degas, literally dreaming of becoming famous, preferred to remain invisible. At that time, there was even a joke in Paris:

Friends often made fun of the master, saying that there was only one way to get Degas to finish the picture - to take it away from him. The master constantly rewrote his works, adding new details. Curiously, sometimes it even reached the point of absurdity: he stole or bought back already sold or donated canvases in order to add details or change something, achieving even more precise lines, even more natural poses, even greater … perfection.

So, more than a dozen times he crushed the sculpture "Fourteen-year-old dancer", which he sculpted from wax: And that was all Edgar Degas. By the way, by the end of his life, Degas sculpted numerous wax sculptures when he began to lose his sight. They were discovered after his death in the basement of the house. Bronze copies were later cast from them, which are kept in modern museums to this day. These were mainly images of horses and dancers.

The artist created his world famous paintings with pastels. And this, as you know, is a very unreliable and short-lived layer of paint pigment on the surface of the cardboard or canvas, when fixed, the colors fade significantly. Degas, in order to solve this problem, came up with the idea of keeping ready-made pastel works over steam and invented some unknown methods of drawing with this material, and also personally selected special frames for his paintings … Today, many of the artist's brilliant paintings can be seen only once every few years - at special exhibitions.

Art critics call the pastel masters a "dancer painter", and this is true. In his heritage there are more than one and a half thousand canvases, where dancers were depicted in one way or another, and first of all, ballerinas. By the way, the backstage life of the ballet was portrayed by the artist so vividly and believably that one can easily imagine how fresh and original his work seemed to his contemporaries.

Ballet was truly an artist's passion. For twenty years, Degas systematically bought tickets to the theater, and only fifteen years later, the director of the Paris Theater gave permission to the artist to write behind the scenes and at rehearsals. Until that time, the painter invited dancers to his studio as models. He made sketches and sketches, and sometimes just watched them. Many of them thought he was crazy, not understanding why the artist asks them to walk around the studio and comb their hair.

There were all sorts of gossip among the models about the artist, which, of course, contained a huge grain of truth. “Do you know how they pose at Degas? - one model asked the critic Gustave Coccio, once meeting him in the ballroom. "Well, women sit in the bathtubs and wash their butts." Indeed, a series of paintings in the "nude" style was created by the artist, washing or combing his hair.

The artist did not like to work in the open air, therefore he painted indoors, very versatile conveying the twilight and artificial light of the ramp. Probably, Degas intuitively hid his eyes from the sun's rays of light, coasting them, anticipating impending blindness. The fragility and weightlessness of the figures of ballerinas is presented by the artist to the audience either in the twilight of dance classes, or in the light of spotlights on the stage, or even just in short moments of relaxation. The apparent simplicity in compositional construction and the author's indifferent position in relation to his heroines create the impression of someone else's life peeped through the keyhole.

In addition, Degas would be a couch potato; in his entire life he made two significant trips - to Italy and to New Orleans to visit relatives. He was practically a recluse in his workshop.

The most mysterious thing in Degas's life is her personal part. Relatives and friends characterize him as both restrained and quick-tempered person, ready at any second to fall into a fit of anger. He was awkward and grumpy, which gave a reason especially close to fondly call him "bear cub."

Among the narrow circle of people around him, Degas was known as a talented mimic actor. When he undertook to tell the story out loud, these were real performances by one actor. He "gestured, changed voices, made faces, joked, sarcastically, sprinkled quotes." Especially favorite theme of the artist were stories about prim ladies, in which he narrated and immediately demonstrated to others how “she sat down, straightened her dress, pulled up her gloves, looked into her purse, bit her lips, straightened her hair, then her veil” … and so on.

For Degas, women were the separate, sweet, inspiring target of his wit. At the same time, he was never married, there is not even any evidence of the artist's desire for physical intimacy with ballet dancers or models, and this despite the fact that the artist spent most of his creative life with them. However, he also did not have a lady of the heart from high society. Degas himself never told anyone about his relationships with women. And if you consider that the artist also created a whole cycle of works that he painted in brothels and brothels and, where his heroines were prostitutes, sometimes in overly explicit poses, then this fact gives rise to the assumption of the artist's male powerlessness.

Ironically, Degas, who had been considered an impressionist all his life, most clearly showed his talent precisely in the 1890s, after the collapse of the Impressionist group. It was then that his works became the closest in style to impressionism. But this did not happen because of the artist's desire for the colors and forms characteristic of impressionism, but rather due to the progressive loss of vision.

Degas was a fairly wealthy man, but he lived out his life in a neglected bachelor apartment, without friends and no moral support. The artist lived for 83 years, in the last ten years he did not write anything and practically saw nothing. The funeral, as Degas bequeathed, was quiet and modest.

The pastel technique was very popular among painters in the 18th century. Continuing on this topic, read: Painter of Kings and Fair Women: Pastel Portraits by Jean-Etienne Lyotard.