Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol.original_ [81]
Degas, “The Glass of Absinthe,” 1876, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Degas’s “slice of life” shows the lonely downside of modern urban life.
A TERRIBLE IMPRESSION
Known as “that terrible Monsieur Degas,” the abrasive painter opposed all social reform and disliked children, flowers, and dogs. “There is love and there is work,” he said, “but we have only one heart.” And Degas’s heart belonged to his work. “He is incapable of loving a woman,” his friend Mary Cassatt said of the misogynist bachelor.
Born to an affluent banking family, the sarcastic, cold Degas was more intellectual and conservative than the other Impressionists. Although he exhibited with them and mingled at cafés to debate art, he broke with Pissarro and Cassatt in the 1890s over the Dreyfus case. When the Jewish army officer was falsely accused of espionage, Degas’s anti-Semitism estranged him from the other artists who supported Dreyfus. In 1908, nearly blind, Degas stopped painting and became a bitter recluse. “When I die,” he said, “they will see how hard I worked.”
AT THE BAR. Degas’s “Glass of Absinthe” shows a similar overloading of the figures to one side, balanced by the diagonal zigzag of empty tables drawing the reader into the picture. Although the painting has the abrupt, realistic quality of a snapshot and presents contemporary life unadorned, the effect was painstakingly contrived. Degas refused to prettify his subject, shown with brutal honesty seated before a glass of absinthe. “Art cannot be done with the intention of pleasing,” he said.
NUDES. After 1886, Degas focused on pictures of women bathing, seen, he said, as if “through a keyhole,” denoting the unposed quality of the works. As with dancers and subjects in the cafés, he did not idealize the figures. “I show them deprived of their airs and affectations, reduced to the level of animals cleaning themselves,” he said. This innovation — to portray nudes unaware of observation, engaged in strictly utilitarian acts like toweling dry or combing their hair — gives nakedness for the first time a practical function in a picture.
To avoid stereotyped poses, Degas directed his models to move freely about the studio. He later fabricated a pose from memory, to convey a private but thoroughly natural attitude. “It is all very well to copy what you see, but it is better to draw only what you still see in your memory,” he said. “Then you reproduce only what has struck you, that is to say, the essentials.” Surprisingly, for one who portrayed the nude so intimately, his pictures emit no sensual warmth. When asked why his women were ugly, Degas replied, “Women in general are ugly.”
PASTELS: A FIRST. As Degas’s eyesight began to fail in the 1870s, he switched from oil to pastel, a powdered pigment in stick form like chalk. Pastels allowed him to draw and color at the same time, and he developed a highly original style, giving new strength to the medium. Degas was first to exhibit pastels as finished works rather than sketches and the only painter to produce a large body of major work in the medium.
As his eyes weakened, Degas’s colors intensified and he simplified his compositions. In the late pastels, he loosened his handling of pigment, which exploded in free, vigorous strokes with bright colors slapped together to enhance the impact of both. He outlined forms decisively, filling them in with patches of pure color. As always, the pictures of nudes seem casually arranged, but the underlying structure was firmly composed and daring.
SCULPTURE. “A blind man’s art” is what Degas called sculpture. Nearly blind, he relied on his sense of touch to model wax figurines of dancers and