Edgar Degas: 11 works

'Edgar Degas was the only important French painter of the Impressionist generation to travel to the United States and make paintings of American subject matter. Degas himself grew up in France, but his mother was Creole and born in New Orleans, and he often called himself a "fils de Louisiane," or a "son of Louisiana."'

'Whereas the academic painters focused on rendering the costumes, as the very official artist Henner did in his portrait of Madame Jeantaud, or rather of her dress, Degas transformed the genre with this highly original, lively image. A transitional space between realist painting which imitates the real world and synthetic painting which offers another reality, this painting triggered Degas' research into multiple viewpoints of the same object, an approach which seems to presage the Cubist portraits of Braque and Picasso.'

'In Degas's youth, his teacher Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres instructed him to "use lines, young man, many lines, both to remember as well as to copy nature."'

'One of the nineteenth century's most innovative artists, Edgar Degas often combined traditional techniques in unorthodox ways. In "Ballet at the Paris Opéra," the artist creatively joined the monotype technique, rarely used in his time, with the fragile medium of pastel.'

'Degas understood the predicament of the Little Dancer--what the contemporary reviewer Joris--Karl Huysmans called her "terrible reality."'

'"Dancer in Her Dressing Room" displays Degas's attraction to the decorative lines, bold foreshortening, and nonlinear perspective he admired in Japanese prints.'

'Stifled by tradition, she regarded her exposure to the work of Edgar Degas in 1874 as a "turning point in my artistic life."'

'This image is related to the suite of bather nudes that Degas showed at the final Impressionist exhibition in 1886. He affirmed his aim to show "a human creature preoccupied with herself--a cat who licks herself...It is as if you had looked through a key-hole."'

'In reference to another work in the series, the perversely contradictory and impish Degas nonetheless remarked to British painter Walter Sickert that he wanted to "give the idea of that bored and respectfully crushed and impressed absence of sensation that women experience in front of paintings."'

'On 27 August 1892, Degas wrote to his friend, the sculptor Bartholomé, saying that yet again he had to postpone his return to Paris because he had just started another painting: "I wanted to paint, and I decided to try billiard rooms. I thought I knew a bit about perspective, I knew nothing about it, and thought I could replace it through a process of perpendiculars and horizontals, by trying hard to calculate the angles in the spaces. I really worked at it".'

'When Degas died in 1917, 150 wax or clay sculptures were found in his studio. These statues had remained more or less unknown to the public while the artist was alive, except for Dancer Aged 14 which Degas had shown in the Impressionist exhibition in 1881.'