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Etude pour un Autoportrait Edgar Degas, 1855 Sanguine on Paper Rhode Island School of Design Museum |
What can I say about Edgar Degas (1834-1917) that has not been said before? Well, here's a personal perspective. Even from an early age, I admired the French Impressionists—but not Degas. Unlike most Impressionists, he didn't spark a pleasurable, synaptic storm in my frontal cortex by haphazardly shoving dots of complementary color against each other. In fact, much of his color consisted of dull pigments dug from the earth. And his drawing skills, obviously superb, undercut the happily naive idea I'd gotten from some of the Impressionists that I, too, didn't need to know how to draw well (or at all.)
A youthful ignorance is my excuse. Of course, Degas didn't hesitate to use a touch of raw, chromatic color if it made a painting better, especially in his pastels. And because his vision deteriorated with age, his later drawings did present a certain looseness, but beneath it all, of course, lay a solid structure built on a lifetime of drawing. When I first encountered Degas, I didn't understand that he was all about control. Nor did I understand that control is the hallmark of a great artist: control of color, control of line.
Degas was an artist's artist, zig-zagging across borders of artistic style, experimenting with a variety of media and techniques. He didn't hesitate to glue on an extra section of paper if he felt it would give a composition more breathing room. He played with monotypes and monoprints, often taking an old pastel painting and using it as a start. He was an early adopter of photography as a painting reference and, interestingly, that new technology inspired his frequent use of informally-cropped designs. He also studied Eadweard Muybridge's famous series of photographs of horses galloping and dancers dancing to refine his own drawing of these subjects.
If there's anything I learned from studying Degas, it is that an active, inquisitive mind—along with control—is a prerequisite to becoming an artist.
Here are some drawings of his that show his skill as a draughtsman.
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Bust of a Woman Pastel, c.1880 - c.1885 |
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Manet at the Races Pencil, 32 x 24.4 cm, 1870 |
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Mme Jacques Fourchy Pencil, 1883 |
