Edgar Degas crossed bridge to modernism Essay Example For Students

Edgar Degas crossed bridge to modernism Essay Still, for all the complaints lodged against the original of the now-standard museum shop trinket,  Degas, unlike his fellow painters, the French Impressionists, always enjoyed steady support. One such defender, Nina de Villard, said of The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer, The work that is misunderstood today will one day be in a museum looked upon with respect as the first formulation of a new art. De Villard displayed more foresight than her fellow critics. A cast of The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer along with more than 300 oil paintings, watercolors, works on papers and prints are currently enjoying the limelight as the inaugural exhibition of the Metropolitan Musem of Arts new Tisch Galleries. The exhibit, the first of  Degas work in 50 years, will open Tuesday and run through Jan. 8. The range of subjects includes not only  Degas famous ballet dancers, but also paintings of horse races, laundries, brothels, cafes and his lesser-known nudes. Although  Degas  is often associated with the Impressionists, helped them organize their shows and participated in their exhibitions, his art clearly stands apart. His works are the product of carefully made sketches in which he altered reality as he saw fit to create the maximum visual as well as psychological interest. The Impressionists instead worked directly from life, with little preparatory work, to capture fleeting moments. As a result, the viewer of most Impressionist works remains a casual observer, while the viewer of  Degas is often drawn in by the psychological tensions, most evident in his early pieces, and the subtle formal aspects of his later works. Degas work grows out of the long tradition of art history. He is often quoted as telling the Irish writer George Moore that his art was the product of the study of the Old Masters. Degas  met the neo-Classicist artist J. A. D. Ingres in 1855, when a friend of his fathers, M. Edouard Valpincon, refused to lend Ingres Bather to a large show of Ingres works. Valpincon feared the possibility of a fire. When  Degas  heard this, he was furious. You cannot refuse Monsieur Ingres request! he exclaimed. Valpincon relented and took the pieces as well as  Degas  to Ingres. Ingres advised the young artist to draw lines . . . many lines, after nature and from memory.  Degas  took the advice to heart. Ingres is present in all of  Degas lines crisp, sensitive and with little shading as is apparent in his studies for his first masterpiece, The Bellelli Family. Degas  went to Italy the prerequisite trip for any artist of his day in 1856 and reached Florence in 1858. There, he began a painting of his aunt Lauras family, the Bellellis.  Degas composition is bold and differs from Ingres in the unconventional pose used and and the narrative elements in the works background. Three of the family members the wife, one of the two girls and the husband look away from the viewer. Only the standing girl stares out of the canvas in typical Ingres fashion. The figures wear dark clothing, signifying the familys mourning of  Degas grandfather, represented in the drawing hanging on the wall. The black outfit also hides Lauras pregnancy; but what is not hidden is the tension between her and her husband. Her sad face and Ingres-like features appealed to  Degas  and clearly his sympathy for the familys discord lies with his aunt. The husband is shown in an awkward and unflattering pose, isolated and separate from both his wife and children. Although  Degas  continued to paint such portraits throughout most of his life, he found them boring and beneath his ambitions. He turned to producing history paintings, of which his first entry into the Paris Salon, The Misfortunes of the City of Orleans, was one. But such works were not  Degas strength. The best that can be said of them is that he introduced to the genre contemporary figures to replace the tradition use of Greek ideals. Slough And Composed Upon Westminster Bridge EssayComplex compositional arrangements, which already with Dancers at Their Toilette had become quite a bit simplier, and  Degas interest in subtle psychological nuances were superseded in his final works by his interest in the physicality of his subjects. His pictures became simplified. The number of figures in a work was reduced, heads became generalized and features nearly nonexistent.  Degas  returned to studying the body almost exclusively the female body with an almost clinical coldness. He told Moore, I show them (women) deprived of their airs and affections reduced to the level of animals cleaning themselves. Figures such as those in After the Bath primarily display a real sense of weight, mass and physicalness. The strain of the pose of After the Bath, which consists of a young woman oddly arched over the back of a chaise longue, is slightly exaggerated to express the figures awkward position. In other works, the arms long tired of posing hang slightly longer than believable. In all these works, definite indications of features and details are suppressed. A general color usually an unnatural color envelopes the form and lines are strategically placed to indicate the forms contours. These nudes, some of  Degas greatest works, with all their sensuous color, nearly abstract simplicity and strange croppings break through to the emergence of modern art.