Edgar Degas citations
Edgar Degas
Date de naissance: 19. juillet 1834
Date de décès: 27. septembre 1917
Hilaire Germain Edgar de Gas, dit Edgar Degas, né le 19 juillet 1834 à Paris et mort le 27 septembre 1917 dans la même ville, est un artiste peintre, graveur, sculpteur et photographe, naturaliste et impressionniste français.
Si Degas est un membre fondateur du groupe des impressionnistes, son œuvre est si variée par ses thèmes et sa pratique qu'il ne les rejoint pas dans leurs traits les plus connus. Sa situation d’exception n’échappe pas aux critiques d’alors, souvent déstabilisés par son avant-gardisme, qui fait, encore aujourd’hui, l’objet de nombreux débats auprès des historiens d’art.
Edgar de Gas était un aristocrate, fils d'Auguste de Gas, banquier, et de Célestine Musson, une créole américaine de La Nouvelle-Orléans. Son grand-père maternel, Germain Musson, d'origine française, est né à Port-au-Prince et s'est installé à La Nouvelle-Orléans en 1810,.
De Gas naît à Paris au no 8 rue Saint-Georges, le 19 juillet 1834, et grandit dans un milieu bourgeois cultivé. Il a deux frères et deux sœurs et jouit d’une enfance dorée rue Saint-Georges. Entre 1845 et 1853, il fait ses études au lycée Louis-le-Grand où il a pour professeur de dessin Léon Cogniet . Il y rencontre Henri Rouart, Paul Valpinçon et Ludovic Halévy qui seront ses amis intimes. En 1847, sa mère meurt à l'âge de trente-deux ans.
Citations Edgar Degas
„Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things.“
— Edgar Degas
Quoted in Artists on Art: From the XIV to the XX Century, ed. Robert Goldwater (Pantheon, 1945)
„I should like to be famous and unknown.“
— Edgar Degas
Degas said this to Henri Rouart, as cited by Antoine Terrasse, in Degas (Chartwell Books, 1982)
„Apart from my heart, I feel everything grows old in me. Even my heart has something artificial. It has been sewn by the dancers in a soft, pink satin purse like their shoes.“
— Edgar Degas
Quote in Degas' letter to the sculptor Paul-Albert Bartolomé, January 1886; as cited in [http://rupkatha.com/dance-in-impressionism/ 'Performing Fine Arts: Dance as a Source of Inspiration in Impressionism, by Johannis Tsoumas]
„A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, and some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people.“
— Edgar Degas
quote from Georges Jeanniot, in Souvenirs sur Degas (Memories of Degas, 1933)
„If I were the government I would have a special brigade of gendarmes to keep an eye on artists who paint landscapes from nature. Oh, I don't mean to kill anyone; just a little dose of bird-shot now and then as a warning.“
— Edgar Degas
"Some of Degas' Views on Art" (p. 56)
Degas hated to paint outdoor and even to see landscape-paintings, like for instance the 'draughty' ones of Monet
„Oh! Women can never forgive me. They hate me, they can feel that I ‘m disarming them. I show them without their coquetry, in the states of animals cleaning themselves...... I'm sure of it; they see me as the enemy. Fortunately, since if they did like me, that would be the end of me.“
— Edgar Degas
In Degas by Himself, Drawings, Paintings, Writings, ed. Richard Kendall 2000, p. 299
„A painting is above all a product of the artist's imagination, it must never be a copy. If, at a later stage, he wants to add two or three touches from nature, of course it doesn't spoil anything.“
— Edgar Degas
Quoted by Maurice Sérullaz, L'univers de Degas (H. Scrépel, 1979), p. 13
„[make drawings of] series of instruments and players; their shapes, twisting of the hands, arms and neck of the violinist; for example, puffing out and hollowing of the cheeks of bassoonists, oboists, etc..“
— Edgar Degas
Quote from Degas' Notebook (undated); as quoted in Impressionism: A Centenary Exhibition, Anne Distel, Michel Hoog, Charles S. Moffett, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, (New York, N.Y.) 1975, pp. 81-82
„.. women...... their way of observing, combining, sensing the way they dress. They compare a thousand of more visible things with one another than a man does.“
— Edgar Degas
Quote from The private lives of the Impressionists, Sue Roe, Harpen Collins Publishers, New York 2006, p. 53
„Hitherto the nude has always been represented in poses which presuppose an audience; but these women of mine are honest, simple folk, unconcerned by any other interests than those involved in their physical condition. Here is another; she is washing her feet. It is as if you looked through a key-hole.“
— Edgar Degas
Quoted by George Moore, in Impressions and Opinions (1891)
„There is a kind of success that is indistinguishable from panic.“
— Edgar Degas
Quoted by Daniel Halévy, Degas Parle (1960) [My Friend Degas, trans. and ed. Mina Curtiss, Wesleyan University Press, 1964], p. 119
