An exhibition of 90 rare works by Edgar Degas is currently on exhibit at the Patty & Jay Baker Naples Museum of Art. Titled Edgar Degas: The Private Impressionist, the exhibit includes 20 drawings, prints, photographs, etchings, monotypes and even a Degas sculpture, as well as a select group of 17 works on paper by artists in Degas' circle such as Cassatt, Paul Cezanne and Henre de Toulouse-Lautrec.
On December 1, art historian John Stewart will also be at the Phil to deliver a lecture on Degas: The Passionate Observer. It's part of the Phil's Lifelong Learning Program and the first in a three part lecture series that will include presentations on Valesquez and Edouard Manet.
Edgar Degas is often characterized as an Impressionist painter, and although he empathized with their goals and techniques, he maintained his distance from them as a group. Like Monet, Renoir and the other Impressionists, Degas strove to capture his subjects on canvas the way in which the eye actually perceived them, rather than as the mind knew them to be. But where the Impressionists were chiefly consumed with the effects of light and color, Degas was obsessed with design, draughtsmanship and especially movement.
And frequently, that movement carried his subjects beyond the edge of the canvas and outside of its frame, a convention long prohibited by classical rules of European painting. His refusal to be confined by the four corners of paper or canvas also freed him to portray impressions of space and solid form from unexpected angles and unconventional perspectives. It was for this reason that he preferred ballerinas and race horses as his motifs. Both permitted him to explore bodies from all sides and attitudes, with parts of some figures cropped right out of the composition.
Degas did not paint ballerinas because they were pretty. In fact, he did not care for their tempestuous moods at all. “People call me the painter of dancing girls,” Degas once remarked to Paris art dealer Ambroise Vollard. “It has never occurred to them that my chief interest in dancers lies in rendering movement and painting pretty clothes.”
As Paul Trachtman wrote in 2003 for Smithsonian Magazine, "The ballerinas Degas bequeathed to us remain among the most popular images in 19th-century art. He cropped his pictures as a photographer would (and also became one); he defied traditional composition, opting for asymmetry and radical viewpoints; and he rubbed pastels over his monotype (or one-of-a-kind) prints, creating dramatic effects. Yet he always managed to keep an eye on the great masters of the past. His younger friend, the poet Paul Valéry, described him as 'divided against himself; on the one hand driven by an acute preoccupation with truth, eager for all the newly introduced and more or less felicitous ways of seeing things and of painting them; on the other hand possessed by a rigorous spirit of classicism, to whose principles of elegance, simplicity and style he devoted a lifetime of analysis.'”
This but scratches the surface of a painter whose thinking and art was deep and complex. To learn more about Degas, The Passionate Observer, be sure to attend art historian John Stewart's lecture on Thursday, December 1 at 10 a.m. in the Toni Stabile Building, located just south of the Naples Philharmonic Center for the Arts.
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