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Degas and the Nude
Edgar Degas
Biography
Edgar Degas- “Self-Portrait”
(1834-1917)
French painter and sculptor, one of the outstanding figures of Impressionism.
Edgar Degas exhibited at seven out of the eight Impressionist exhibitions, but he stood somewhat aloof from the other members of the group and his work was Impressionist only in certain limited aspects.
Like the other Impressionists, Degas aimed to give the suggestion of spontaneous and unplanned scenes and a feeling of movement, and like them, he was influenced by photography (he often cut off figures in the manner of a snapshot) and by Japanese color prints (he imitated their use of unfamiliar viewpoints).
However, he had little interest in landscape (he did not paint out of doors) and therefore did not share the Impressionist concern for rendering the effects of changing light and atmosphere. The appearance of spontaneity and accidental effects in his work was an appearance only; in reality his pictures were carefully composed.
He said that ‘Even when working from nature, one has to compose’ and that ‘No art was ever less spontaneous than mine’.
Degas always worked much in pastel and when his sight began to fail in the 1880s his preference for this medium increased. He also began modeling in wax at this time, and during the 1890s — as his sight worsened — he devoted himself increasingly to sculpture, his favorite subjects being horses in action, women at their toilet, and nude dancers. These figures were cast in bronze after his death. For the last 20 years of his life Degas was virtually blind and led a reclusive life. He was a formidable personality and his complete devotion to his art made him seem cold and aloof (as far as is known, he never had any kind of romantic involvement).
His genius compelled universal respect among other artists. Degas drawings and sculptures continue to be exhibited around the world. However, Renoir ranked him above Rodin as a sculptor, and in 1883 Camille Pissarro wrote that he was ‘certainly the greatest artist of our epoch’.
He was the first of the Impressionist group to achieve recognition and his reputation as one of the giants of 19th-century art has endured undiminished. His influence on 20th-century art has been rich and varied-on artists whom he knew personally, such as Sickert, and on later admirers. He was a superlative draughtsman and his work has appealed greatly to other outstanding draughtsmen, such as Hockney and Picasso. His mastery of pastel has been an inspiration to Kitaj.
Chilvers, Osborne, and Farr, The Oxford Dictionary of Art, Oxford University Press, Oxford, New York, 1997. p. 154
Degas and the Nude
I. The book
“Degas and the Nude” by Xavier Rey, 2011
Book Description
Publication Date: October 31, 2011
The nude figure was critical to the art of Edgar Degas throughout his life, and yet frequently his expansive body of work on this subject has been overshadowed by his celebrated portraits and dancers. Degas and the Nude is the first book in a generation to explore the artist’s treatment of the nude from his early years in the 1850s and 1860s, through his triumphs in the 1880s and 1890s, all the way to his last decades when the theme dominated his artistic production in all media. With essays by leading American and French critics, it provides a new interpretation of Degas’ evolving conception of the nude, situating it in the subject’s broader context among his peers in nineteenth-century France. It explores how Degas exploited all of the body’s expressive possibilities, how his vision of the nude informed his notion of modernity, and how he abandoned the classical or historical form in favor of a figure seen in her own time and setting–whether engaged in overtly carnal acts or just stepping out of an ordinary bath. More than 200 lushly rendered full-color images present a re-seeing of Degas’ subject in paintings, pastels, drawings, prints and sculpture. Among them are the most important of Degas’ early paintings of nudes, Scene of War in the Middle Ages, which exerted a lifelong influence on the artist’s treatment of the female nude and includes poses repeated throughout his career; monotypes of the late 1870s, almost caricature-like in their imagery, illustrating Degas’ most explicitly sexual depictions of women in Parisian brothels; and a number of pictures portraying the daily life of women wherever they may reside. Together these iterations range over more than a half-century of genius achievement and present a groundbreaking look at the evolution of this master artist.
News from my home town
CHAVES, PORTUGAL
Important links related to this post:
- Chaves- link to the official site of our municipality
link to a great blog (“Olhares sobre a cidade”), run by Fernando Ribeiro, daily updated, in which different themes are approached, from politics to poetry. Some posts are closely related to our town’s issues; others refer to universal questions and matters. (While visiting the blog you are tuned to a radio station. This is quite something!)
Besides that Fernando Ribeiro usually posts some of his photos, always quite good ones, whether from specific scheduled issues as for example about our villages surrounding, or from “instantaneous” events he finds relevant witnessing through his camera and sharing with people. His aim is mainly to make people aware of what’s happening around them, or simply to call their attention to something they hadn’t noticed / realized before.
Being an artist, more than a simple photographer, Fernando Ribeiro has “the eye”. The eye and the love for his art. That’s why his sensitivity guides him towards quite simple, rather “unseen” stuff for the eyes of ‘the common people’ where he finds beauty that he keeps in the eternal memory of a photo.
He shares those tiny, great, awesome things in this blog, as well. And we all are so very grateful, mainly because he’s one of our best ambassadors and all his work is done for free.
* See some of Fernando Ribeiro’s latest (posted) photos below.
Link
“Self-portrait”
K. Malevich
Kazimir Severinovich Malevich (February 23, 1879 — May 15, 1935) was a Russian painter, designer and art theoretician, born in Ukraine of ethnic Polish parents. He was the pioneer of geometric abstract art and the originator of the Avant-garde Suprematist movement.
Born near Kiev; trained at Kiev School of Art and Moscow Academy of Fine Arts; 1913 began creating abstract geometric patterns in style he called suprematism; taught painting in Moscow and Leningrad 1919-21; published book, The Nonobjective World (1926), on his theory; first to exhibit abstract geometric paintings; strove to produce pure, cerebral compositions; famous painting White on White (1918) carries suprematist theories to absolute conclusion; Soviet politics turned against modern art, and he died in poverty and oblivion.
He began working in an unexceptional Post-Impressionist manner, but by 1912 he was painting peasant subjects in a massive `tubular’ style similar to that of Léger as well as pictures combining the fragmentation of form of Cubism with the multiplication of the image of Futurism (The Knife Grinder, Yale Univ. Art Gallery, 1912).
Malevich, however, was fired with the desire `to free art from the burden of the object’ and launched the Suprematist movement, which brought abstract art to a geometric simplicity more radical than anything previously seen. He claimed that he made a picture `consisting of nothing more than a black square on a white field’ as early as 1913, but Suprematist paintings were first made public in Moscow in 1915 and there is often difficulty in dating his work. (There is often difficulty also in knowing which way up his paintings should be hung, photographs of early exhibitions sometimes providing conflicting evidence.)
Salvador Dalí- More pics and… quotations!
The enigma of desire,1929
The Enigma of Desire: My Mother, My Mother, My Mother, 1929
This great composition, among the first works of the Surrealist period, is one of the most important. Dalí painted The Enigma of Desire in Figueras just as he was finishing The Lugubrious Game.
“I did it at the same time as The Great Masturbator“, he relatess “immediately after summer. My aunt had a large dressmaking workroom and it was there that I did all these pictures. The Great Masturbator was taken from a chromo that I had which depicted a woman smelling a lily. Naturally the face is mixed with memories of Cadaqués, of summer, of the rocks of Cape Creus.” The Enigma of Desirewas the first work sold by the Goemans Gallery during Dalí’s first one-man exhibition there in 1929; the Viscount of Noailles bought it together with The Lugubrious Game. Just as he was painting this canvas, Dalí found a religious chromolithograph on which he wrote, “Sometimes I spit with pleasure on my mother’s portrait,” commenting that what he did then “had a quite pschoanalytical explanation, since one can perfectly well love one’s mother and still dream that one spits upon her, and even more, in many religions, expectoration is a sign of veneration; now go and try to make people understand that!”
In the baroque appendage that elongates the visage, we recognize the geological structures of the rocks of the region near Cape Creus eroded by the wind, mixed with the fantastic architecture of Antonio Gaudi, “that gothic Mediterranean,” whose work Dalí had seen as a child in Barcelona.
The second part of the title, My Mother, My Mother, My Mother, was inspired by one of Tristan Tzara’s poems, “The Great Lament of My Darkness,” which appeared in 1917. Dalí considers The Enigma of Desire to be one of his ten most important paintings. The little group on the left depicts Dalí himself embracing his father, with a fish, a grasshopper, a dagger, and a lion’s head.
“The great masturbator”
“female figure”, Dalí
“The hallucinogenic toreador”, 1970
“Persistence of memory”, Dalí
“Paranoiac visage”, Dalí, 1935
“Lincoln”
“Thought”, 1925
Quotations by Salvador Dalí
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Dalí, “the hallucinogenic”
Salvador Dalí
Dali, photograph, 29.11.1939
“The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.”
Salvador Dalí
“The world will admire me. Perhaps I’ll be despised and misunderstood, but I’ll be a great genius, I’m certain of it.”
Salvador Dali
“Everyone should eat hashish, but once.”
“Take me, I am the drug; take me, I am hallucinogenic.”
Nadir Afonso is never too much!
Belize
Bristol
Coliseu
Curitiba
Jardins de Antuérpia
Rio de Janeiro
Pontes de Leninegrado (São Petersburgo)
Banjul
Marraquexe
Dora
Pisa, 1950, diário de viagem
Praça de S. Marcos, 1950
Gaia
About Nadir:
Nadir Afonso (1920, Chaves, Portugal) is a painter and one of the foremost geometric abstractionists.
Formally trained in architecture, which he practiced early in his career with Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer, Nadir Afonso later studied painting in Paris and became one of the pioneers in Kinetic art, working alongside Victor Vasarely, Fernand Léger, Auguste Herbin, and André Bloc.
Nadir-livro
As a theorist of his own geometry-based aesthetics, published in several books, Nadir Afonso defends that art is purely objective and ruled by mathematical laws that treat art not as an act of imagination but as an act of observation, perception, and form manipulation.
Nadir Afonso achieved international recognition early on in his career and currently holds many of his works in museums around the world. At the age of 91 he’s still actively painting.
Related links:
http://espacillimite.blogs.sapo.pt/
