FROM THE PUBLISHER

A compact survey of Degas's art from early portraits to late nudes and bathers.

Edgar Degas (1834-1917), a founding member of the Impressionist movement, was one of the group's most original and independent artists. This Tiny Folio offers insight into the themes and preoccupations that make his paintings, sculptures, and brilliant pastels so well-loved today.

As sublime as it is thorough, this survey of Degas's life and art illustrates his famous and perceptive portraits, his enchanting pictures of Parisian life, his beloved and popular racehorse scenes, his late nudes and bathers, and his celebrated depictions of the opera and ballet.

Other Details: 247 full-color illustrations 288 pages 4 x 4" Published 1996

by the Spanish painter Diego Velazquez. As the story goes, Edouard Manet, then one of the best known members of the artistic vanguard, noticed Degas, intervened and advised, and the two artists became friends. Manet, of course, was recognized as the painter who most vividly captured in his art the savor of modern Paris, its crowds both high and low, the spirit of a city of splendor and misery. Encouraged by Manet's new realism, Degas embraced Paris with a passion, searching out new and unexplored subjects for his pencil and brush.

Through the 1870s, Degas painted modern life: images of the racecourse, the ballet, cafes, even brothels were his specialties, along with portraits of critics and collectors, artists and writers. He traveled to New Orleans in 1872-73 to visit his brothers, businessmen who had settled there with their families, and the artist discovered fascinating subjects in the New World, such as the office where his family bought and sold cotton (pages 94, 95). On his return to Paris Degas, like many other young painters, grew dissatisfied with the officially-sponsored exhibitions of conventional modern painting. "The realist movement no longer needs to fight with the others," he wrote to the painter James Tissot in 1874, "it already is, it exists, it must show itself as something distinct, there must be a salon of realists."

Plans were already well underway for an exhibition of independent painting-the first of eight such presentations by the painters who would soon be called the Impressionists. (Degas participated in all but the seventh of these, in 1882.) In general, he was admired by the critics, who saw him as less intransigent than some of the landscape painters in the group. But he soon provoked controversy: in 1881 his sculpture Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer was a bold realist statement, and at the 1886 exhibition, his suite of awkwardly posed nudes was nothing short of sensational.

The works that Degas exhibited with the Impressionists were created in an astonishing variety of media. In addition to oil paintings on canvas, he made a special place for his works on paper, showing drawings in pencil, chalk, or charcoal, as well as pictures in pastel, gouache, distemper, and his favored peinture a l'essence, oil colors thinned with spirits. His versatility in these media was a decision both artistic and practical: a reversal in his family's fortunes in the mid-1870s made it necessary for Degas to sell more of his art; small paintings and works on paper were more easily marketed. In 1877 he exhibited a group of experimental works he called "drawings made with thick ink and then printed" (these are now commonly called "monotypes"). He was inventive in sculpture as well: the Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer was an alarmingly lifelike wax figure, wearing a miniature dancer's costume, wig, and hair ribbon.

Degas in the studio was like a chef in his kitchen, experimenting with new recipes for piquant mixtures of media, carefully adjusting the dimensions of a work of art to accent its flavor, aiming to delight and surprise his audience with an unexpected color or a radical point of view. He used his notebooks to record his experiments, to jot down the addresses of suppliers, to set forth new recipes for his techniques, or to plan new strategies for working: "Study from all perspectives a face or an object, anything . . . set up tiers all around the room to get used to drawing things from above and below. Only paint things seen in a mirror . . . pose the model on the ground floor and work on the first floor to get used to retaining forms and expressions and to never drawing or painting immediately." In the studio, Degas's memory and imagination conspired to create works with a surprising sense of immediacy, often coming from the artist's distinctive vantage point-near or far from the action, above or below (pages 120, 138, 200).

From our study of the works themselves, and from his own writings, as well as those of his friends and associates, there emerges a picture of Degas as a great manipulator of his materials and his subjects. "Art is the same word as artifice," he said, "that is to say, something deceitful. It must succeed in giving the impression of nature by false means, but it has to look true. Draw a straight line askew, as long as it gives the impression of being straight!" When the public saw spontaneity in the works of Degas--for Impressionists were commonly thought to work quickly and freely--Degas reacted violently: "I assure you that no art was ever less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and the study of the great masters; of inspiration, spontaneity, temperament--temperament is the word--I know nothing."

Calculating. Deceitful. Reflective. Artificial. These are the words that Degas might have used to describe a great artist. "The artist must live apart, and his private life remain unknown," he once said. Degas was notoriously silent on issues of the heart, and while from youth to old age he had many close friends, his relationships with them often soured, due to his stubbornness and famously foul temper. He disagreed with his lifelong friend, dramatist Ludovic Halevy, over the guilt of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer wrongly accused of treason. Although they had been close for years, Degas ultimately wrote to Mme Halevy in 1897 that she should no longer invite him to her home.

If Degas can be accused of cruelty, it must be said that he was at least aware of his harshness. To art dealer and collector Ambroise Vollard, he joked, "If I did not treat people as I do I would never have a minute to myself for work. But I am really timid by nature." To Evariste de Valernes, a minor painter with whom he had been friends since the 1860s, he wrote in 1890:

I was or I seemed to be hard with everyone through a sort of passion for brutality, which came from my uncertainty and my bad humor. I felt myself so badly equipped, so weak, whereas it seemed to me that my calculations on art were so right. I brooded against the whole world and against myself. I ask your pardon if, beneath the pretext of this damned art, I have wounded your very intelligent and fine spirit, maybe even your heart.

As the century came to a close, the artist was still at work, as strong in his "calculations" as he had been when a young man. But the specter of blindness, which had threatened him since the 1870s, closed in on him. "Since my eyesight has diminished further, my twilight has become more and more lonely and more and more somber. Only the taste for art and the desire to succeed keep me going," he wrote to his sister's family. Although still making art, Degas had periods of ill health and, it seems, depression. Halevy's son, Daniel, went to see the painter in 1904 and was shocked "to see him dressed like a tramp, grown so thin, another man entirely."

Degas went one last time to visit his family in Italy during the autumn of 1906. In 1912 he was forced to abandon the apartment in which he had lived for more than a decade. The move seems to have weakened his will: "Since I moved," he told a friend, "I no longer work. I let everything go. It's amazing how indifferent you get in old age." When he could no longer travel, he rode the omnibus or the tram to the suburbs. He walked the streets of Paris almost daily until, in 1915, his health began to fade seriously. Watched over by his niece, he died in 1917. His friends--some of whom he had not seen in years--buried him in the family tomb at Montmartre cemetery, as the guns of war sounded in the distance.