Edgar Degas - Icon Profile | Alexandria
Edgar Degas (1834-1917) stands as one of the most enigmatic figures of French Impressionism, though he preferred to be called a "realist" and rejected the Impressionist label despite his close association with the movement. Born Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas to a wealthy Parisian banking family, he would later simplify his name while creating an artistic legacy that was anything but simple.
First emerging in Paris's artistic circles during the 1850s, Degas initially trained in the classical tradition, copying Old Masters at the Louvre and studying at the École des Beaux-Arts. His early works, including historical paintings and portraits, revealed his exceptional draftsmanship, but it was his later focus on contemporary urban life that would define his genius. Letters from the 1860s show his growing fascination with capturing modern Parisian life, particularly the world of the Paris Opéra.
The artist's most celebrated works center on ballet dancers, racehorses, and intimate scenes of women at their toilette, yet these subjects served as vehicles for revolutionary artistic exploration rather than mere documentation. Degas's innovative compositions, with their unusual angles and cropped frames, suggested the influence of photography and Japanese prints while creating a distinctly modern vocabulary of seeing. Despite his association with the Impressionists, participating in seven of their eight exhibitions between 1874 and 1886, Degas worked primarily in his studio, meticulously planning each composition and preferring artificial light to plein-air painting.
Degas's legacy continues to intrigue and challenge viewers today. His technically brilliant yet psychologically complex depictions of dancers and bathers have sparked ongoing debates about his attitudes toward his subjects, while his late-career experiments with different media, including sculpture and photography, reveal an artist constantly pushing boundaries. Modern scholars particularly note his influence on cinema and photography, seeing in his work an early understanding of the fractured, dynamic nature of modern perception. As contemporary audiences grapple with questions of gender, power, and representation in art, Degas's work remains remarkably relevant, inviting us to consider how the act of looking shapes our understanding of both art and society.
What emerges is a portrait of an artist who, while firmly rooted in tradition, helped birth modernism through his radical approach to composition, movement, and the human figure. His famous quote, "Art is not what you see, but what you make others see," continues to resonate, challenging us to look deeper into both his work and our own ways of seeing.