FONDATION BEYELER
Press Release
Edgar Degas
30 September 2012 – 27 January 2013
With Edgar Degas’ late work, the Fondation Beyeler will be holding Switzerland’s first
exhibition in about twenty years of one of France’s most famous late 19th century painters. It
will also be the first exhibition exclusively devoted to Edgar Degas’ rich and complex late
work (from around 1886 to 1912), the culmination of a highly productive career spanning
more than six decades. Degas’ late work represents the ultimate artistic achievement of a
bold precursor of modern art, which he significantly influenced together with younger friends
and colleagues like Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. Although Edgar Degas’
art enjoys great popularity, Degas exhibitions are generally limited to his Impressionist period
(around 1870 to 1885) or to individual aspects of his work.
Two Degas pastels in the permanent collection of the Fondation Beyeler provide the point of
departure for the exhibition’s conception: Breakfast after the Bath (the Bath), around 1895 to
1898, and Three Dancers (Blue Tutus, Red Bodices), around 1903, are masterpieces that
clearly demonstrate the radicalism and modernity of Degas’ late work.
This major exhibition, which will feature over 150 works, will include all the principal motifs
and series that are characteristic of Degas’ late work: famous representations of dancers and
female nudes, jockeys and racehorses, landscapes and portraits. It will encompass all the
techniques with which Degas worked: painting, pastel, drawing, prints, sculpture and
photography. No other artist of that period used a larger number of artistic media than
Degas. In his late work, the fine, delicate painting of his Impressionist period gives way to a
unique pleasure in experimentation and an obsessive creative desire.
The exhibition was conceived by guest curator Martin Schwander, who has worked together
with Michiko Kono, Associate Curator at the Fondation Beyeler, on its staging. Martin
Schwander was earlier responsible for the exhibition «Venice. From Canaletto and Turner to
Monet» in 2008/09.
Despite the fragility and light-sensitivity of most of Degas’s late works, it has been possible to
secure a substantial number of outstanding loans from, in particular, the Kunstmuseum
Basel, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the National Gallery in London, the Bayerische
Staatsgemäldesammlungen in Munich, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the
Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Nasjonalmuseet for kunst, arkitektur og design in
Oslo, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, the
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, the Kunsthaus Zurich and the
Tate as well as well-known European, American and Asian private collections.
The Fondation Beyeler is publishing a catalogue for the exhibition in German and English.
The trade edition is being published by Hatje Cantz Verlag in Ostfildern. The catalogue,
which contains a foreword by Sam Keller and Martin Schwander, an interview with the artist
Jeff Wall, essays by Carol Armstrong, Jonas Beyer, Richard Kendall and Martin Schwander
as well as a biography by Mareike Wolf-Scheel, has 268 pages and 232 illustrations. It is
available at the museum for CHF 68 (ISBN 978-3-906053-02-8, German; ISBN 978-3906053-03-5, English).
The exhibition will be accompanied by a comprehensive programme of dance, music,
interviews, a reading and a lecture. Those taking part will include Sasha Waltz & Guests,
Varvara Nepomnyashchaya, Caroline Durand-Ruel and Wolfram Berger.
Press images can be downloaded from http://pressimages.fondationbeyeler.ch
Further information:
Elena DelCarlo, M.A., Head of PR / Media Relations
tel. + 41 (0)61 645 97 21, presse@fondationbeyeler.ch, www.fondationbeyeler.ch
Fondation Beyeler, Beyeler Museum AG, Baselstrasse 77, CH-4125 Riehen, Switzerland
Fondation Beyeler opening hours: 10 am to 6 pm daily, Wednesdays until 8 pm
FONDATION BEYELER
Media Release
Edgar Degas
30 September 2012 to 27 January 2013
The Fondation Beyeler’s exhibition of work by Edgar Degas (1834–1917) is the first staged in
Switzerland and southern Germany for twenty years. At the same time, it is the first ever
show devoted to this important late 19th century French painter to focus exclusively on his
rich and complex late work, the culmination of an artistic career spanning more than sixty
years. In Degas’ late work, created between around 1886 and 1912, the creativity of a daring
pioneer of Modernism reached its masterly apotheosis.
Although Edgar Degas’s art enjoys great popularity, exhibitions of his work generally focus
on his Impressionist phase from the early 1870s to the mid-1880s or on specific aspects of
his oeuvre. By contrast, the exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler brings together over 150
representative works encompassing all the themes and series important to an understanding
of Degas’s late work: dancers and female nudes, jockeys and race horses as well as
landscapes and portraits.
The exhibition starts at a point in time when Degas’s work was beginning to show signs of
fundamental changes in respect of its style and content. In the second half of the 1880s,
Degas abandoned the highly detailed, delicate painting that had been his trademark during
the Impressionist period, while simultaneously renouncing the »picturesque«, genre-like
themes of big city life in Paris. This period saw Degas disengaging from his Impressionist
companions as well. With advancing age, he also began to model wax sculptures – threedimensional, partly fragmentary studies of moving or static human figures and horses
discovered in his studio only after his death, 74 of which were later cast in bronze.
The eighth and last Impressionist exhibition took place in 1886. In the three decades that
followed, Degas increasingly distanced himself from the art world, shunning contact with the
art-loving public. He was one of the few artists who could afford to behave in this way:
Parisian dealers repeatedly bought works from his studio for European and American private
collectors. Only a small number of solo exhibitions authorised by the artist were held in the
years until his death in 1917. That gradual withdrawal from public life has contributed to the
impression, still widespread today, that Degas was a difficult loner. From the 1890s onwards,
the idiosyncratic bachelor lived in a kind of »inner emigration« in which he surrendered
himself solely to his art. The late work he created in the process is one of the most exciting
and obsessive to be found anywhere in European art history.
The stylistic characteristics of Degas’s late work include discontinuous spaces, asymmetric
compositions that disintegrate, unusual vantage points and unconventional poses by the
figures he represents, which are shown in the foreground. The intimate physical proximity of
the (male) viewer to the female figures is counteracted by the irritating imprecision of the
representation, with its blurred contours. The seductive luminosity of the colours, which fill
the pictorial space with an iridescent light, gives what we see in the pictures an indefinite
quality, both spatially and temporally. Degas transported what he described as his »orgies of
colour« to a remote, dreamlike state in which present and past, things seen and things
remembered are indissolubly interwoven.
Through his constant variation and combination of a small number of motifs, Degas created
extensive series founded on a pioneering concept of the work of art. Individual paintings
cease to be stand-alone works and instead always point to the conceptual premises
underlying the »serial« work in progress. The exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler therefore
encompasses not only all the themes Degas explored but also all the techniques he used: oil
painting, pastels, drawing, monotype, lithography, photography and sculpture. No other artist
of the period experimented with as many forms of artistic expression as he did. He spread,
cross-hatched and dabbed the pastels, often with his bare finger. He reworked them with
steam and brushes or scraps of fabric, combining them with gouache, tempera and printing
techniques like monotype. Pastel technique, which inherently and uniquely combines the
qualities of both painting and drawing, as well as being highly tactile, provided the ideal basis
for an oeuvre in which individual artistic achievements conditioned and inspired one another.
The Fondation Beyeler is presenting Degas’s late work in a series of rooms in which different
genres and themes are emphasised in turn. Dancers and portraits are followed by women at
their toilet, after which come landscapes and interiors and then, at the end of the exhibition,
horses and riders.
The show opens with ballet dancers. Interestingly, Degas’s late pictures of ballerinas hardly
ever show them dancing on stage, and the glamour of the dance performances of the 1870s
has vanished. The waiting dancers, either standing or seated, who feature in these works are
young women who are resting, adjusting their costume or practising their dance steps.
Degas ceaselessly studied the poses, movements and costumes of the dancers. He
repeated, varied and combined figure constellations that provided an occasion for bold
experiments with composition and colour. Of his many oil paintings, pastels and drawings on
this theme, three examples deserve particular mention: Danseuse sur la scène from the
Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyons, which dates from around 1889, Danseuses au foyer from
1895/96, which has been loaned by the Von der Heydt-Museum in Wuppertal, and
Danseuses from the Fondation de l’Hermitage in Lausanne, which was painted in around
1898.
The next room is devoted to Degas’s portraits. All his models were friends and
acquaintances of his, some of them long-standing; his close relations with, for example,
Henri Rouart, Ludovic Halévy and Paul Valpinçon dated back to his schooldays. This room
contains poignant portraits such as that of Henri Rouart et son fils Alexis from 1895–98
loaned by the Neue Pinakothek in Munich and the 1904 work Esquisse pour un portrait (M. et
Mme Louis Rouart), which belongs to Richard and Mary L. Gray and the Gray Collection
Trust. Degas liked to spend holidays on his friends’ country estates. The grand home of the
Valpinçon family in Normandy provided the setting both for the 1892 work Salle de billard,
loaned by the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, and for the roughly contemporaneous Intérieur, which
today belongs to a private collection. In the mid-1890s Degas discovered the potential that
photography offered for his artistic purposes. In just a brief span of time, he created a series
of cleverly staged portraits of famous friends such as that of Pierre Auguste Renoir and
Stéphane Mallarmé, loaned by the Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet in Paris, in which
the two men, immersed in twilight, seem to have moved to another sphere.
A further section of the exhibition shows representations of women at their toilet, one of the
most frequent pictorial themes in Degas’s late work. The 1883 pastel Femme au tub from the
Tate and the 1889 pastel Devant le miroir from the Hamburger Kunsthalle are two particularly
fine examples from the 1880s. Most of the late representations of women who are washing
or drying themselves or combing their hair are a significant departure from the idealised
representation of naked women traditional in the history of European art. With this theme,
Degas’s desire to experiment with colour – as found in, for example, the oil painting Femme
au bain from 1893–98 loaned by the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto – as well as his
tendency to represent unusual physical poses come into their own. The latter is exemplarily
illustrated by the famous oil painting Après le bain, femme s’essuyant from the Philadelphia
Museum of Art, which dates from around 1896, in which a female nude, her body arched in
an unusual position, seems to be clinging to the back of a chair in an empty, monochrome
room. With his last works, created after the turn of the century, Degas approached the
boundaries of abstraction. This is shown particularly radically in the pastel Femme
s’essuyant les cheveux from 1900–05, loaned by the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts in
Lausanne, in which the colour spectrum is reduced to hues of red, orange and yellow – and
the colour values blend into one another with the finest nuances.
A separate room presents landscapes by Degas, which are hardly ever shown in public, as
well as works with horses and riders. In the autumn of 1892 Degas surprised the Paris public
with an exhibition at the Galeries Durand-Ruel devoted exclusively to landscapes. The
choice of works caused uncertainty among the public because it was widely known that
Degas had previously always been very disparaging about landscape – the genre for which
the Impressionists were best known. The medium and format chosen by Degas caused
additional irritation. His landscapes were not imposing oil paintings like those of Claude
Monet and Camille Pissarro, but were small-format monotypes printed on sheets of paper. In
addition, his works, which were often heightened with pastels, had little in common with the
luminous magic of Impressionist landscape painting. Created in his studio in the early 1890s,
they in fact often prefigure the dreamily remote landscapes of the generation of Symbolists
who were to follow. Degas’s last landscapes include oil paintings inspired by his visits to the
small seaside resort of Saint-Valery-sur-Somme in Picardy, among them Vue de SaintValery-sur-Somme from 1896–98, which The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has
loaned for the exhibition.
In his late years, Degas used various techniques to represent the motif of horse and rider. In
addition to the 1884 oil painting Chevaux de courses, which has been loaned by the Detroit
Institute of Arts, the exhibition features a selection of sculptures, including Cheval en marche
modelled in the early 1870s, and two examples each of later works featuring jockeys, in the
first case, and horses, in the second. These works, all of them from Swiss private collections,
document Degas’s preoccupation with the representation of complex movements in
precarious moments of transition. The monumental masterpiece Jockey blessé from 1896–
98, on loan from the Kunstmuseum Basel, provides the exhibition’s grand finale.
The exhibition was conceived by guest curator Martin Schwander, who has worked together
with Michiko Kono, Associate Curator at the Fondation Beyeler, on its staging. Martin
Schwander was earlier responsible for the exhibition «Venice. From Canaletto and Turner to
Monet» in 2008/09.
«Edgar Degas» reflects the Fondation Beyeler’s tradition of holding exhibitions devoted to
artists represented in the permanent collection. With Le Petit Déjeuner après le bain from
1895–98 and the 1903 work Trois danseuses (jupes bleues, corsages rouges), the Fondation
Beyeler owns two masterpieces that vividly demonstrate the radicalism and modernism of
Degas’s late work. Both paintings can be seen in the exhibition.
Despite the fragility and light-sensitivity of most of Degas’s late works, it has been possible to
secure a substantial number of outstanding loans from, in particular, the Kunstmuseum
Basel, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the National Gallery in London, the Bayerische
Staatsgemäldesammlungen in Munich, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the
Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Nasjonalmuseet for kunst, arkitektur og design in
Oslo, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, the
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, the Kunsthaus Zurich and the
Tate as well as well-known European, American and Asian private collections.
The Fondation Beyeler is publishing a catalogue for the exhibition in German and English.
The trade edition is being published by Hatje Cantz Verlag in Ostfildern. The catalogue,
which contains a foreword by Sam Keller and Martin Schwander, an interview with the artist
Jeff Wall, essays by Carol Armstrong, Jonas Beyer, Richard Kendall and Martin Schwander
as well as a biography by Mareike Wolf-Scheel, has 268 pages and 232 illustrations. It is
available at the museum for CHF 68 (ISBN 978-3-906053-02-8, German; ISBN 978-3906053-03-5, English).
The exhibition will be accompanied by a comprehensive programme of activities: dance
performances by Sasha Waltz & Guests, a lecture by Caroline Durand-Ruel about Paul
Durand-Ruel, the famous Paris art dealer and patron of Degas, a piano evening with Varvara
Nepomnyashchaya, the winner of the Concours Géza Anda 2012, a reading with Wolfram
Berger from the new translation of Ambroise Vollard’s book Degas. An intimate Portrait, as
well as various interviews.
Press images available at: http://pressimages.fondationbeyeler.ch
Further information:
Elena DelCarlo, M.A., Head of PR / Media Relations
tel. + 41 (0)61 645 97 21, presse@fondationbeyeler.ch, www.fondationbeyeler.ch
Fondation Beyeler, Beyeler Museum AG, Baselstrasse 77, CH-4125 Riehen, Switzerland
Fondation Beyeler opening hours: 10.00 am to 6.00 pm, Wednesdays to 8.00 pm
September 30, 2012 to January 27, 2013
01 Edgar Degas
Danseuses, jupes jaunes, c. 1896
Dancers in Yellow Tutus
Pastel and charcoal on joined paper, 60.2 x 42.4 cm
Private collection
Photo: © 2012 Christie‘s Images Ltd / Bridgeman
02 Edgar Degas
Danseuses aux jupes jaunes, 1903
Dancers in Yellow Tutus
Pastel, 82 x 92 cm
Private collection, Courtesy of M.S.F.A.
Photo: Courtesy of M.S.F.A.
03 Edgar Degas
Trois danseuses (jupes bleues, corsages rouges), c. 1903
Three Dancers (Blue Tutus, Red Bodices)
Pastel, 94 x 81 cm
Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel
Photo: Peter Schibli, Basel
04 Edgar Degas
Jockey blessé, c. 1896−98
The Fallen Jockey
Oil on canvas, 180.6 x 150.9 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel
Photo: Kunstmuseum Basel, Martin P. Bühler
05 Edgar Degas
Après le bain, femme s’essuyant, c. 1896
After the Bath, Woman Drying Herself
Oil on canvas, 89.5 x 116.8 cm
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Purchased with funds
from the estate of George D. Widener, 1980
Photo: © Philadelphia Museum of Art, Graydon Wood
06 Edgar Degas
Danseuses, c. 1896
Dancers in the Green Room
Pastel, 51 x 40 cm
Private collection, Asia
Photo: © 2012 Christie‘s Images Ltd
07 Edgar Degas
Danseuses, décor de paysage, c. 1895–98
Three Dancers, Landscape Scenery
Pastel, 78 x 50 cm
Private collection, Switzerland
Photo: Wolf Fotografie AG, Markus Wolf, Olten, Switzerland
08 Edgar Degas
Le Petit Déjeuner après le bain, c. 1895–98
Breakfast after the Bath
Pastel, 82.5 x 79 cm
Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel
Photo: Robert Bayer, Basel
09 Edgar Degas
Le Petit Déjeuner à la sortie du bain, c. 1895–98
Breakfast after the Bath
Pastel on joined tracing paper, 122 x 92 cm
Private collection
10 Edgar Degas
Maisons au pied d’une falaise, c. 1895−98
Houses at the Foot of a Cliff
Oil on canvas, 92 x 73 cm
Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, Gift of Howard D. and
Babette L. Sirak, the Donors to the Campaign for
Enduring Excellence, and the Derby Fund
Photo: Courtesy of Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio
11 Edgar Degas
Trois danseuses, jupes violettes, c. 1895–98
Three Dancers in Violet Tutus
Pastel on joined paper, 73.2 x 49 cm
Private collection
Photo: Maurice Aeschimann, Onex / Geneva
12 Edgar Degas
La Sortie du bain, c. 1895
Leaving the Bath
Pastel on joined paper, 52.5 x 52.8 cm
Private collection
Photo: © Boltin Picture Library/The Bridgeman Art Library
Press images http://pressimages.fondationbeyeler.ch
This visual material may be used for press purposes only. Reproduction is permitted for the duration of the exhibition only. Please employ
the captions as given and the relevant copyrights. We kindly request you to forward us a voucher copy.
FONDATION BEYELER
September 30, 2012 to January 27, 2013
13 Edgar Degas
Femme au bain, 1893–98
Woman at her Bath
Oil on canvas, 71.1 x 88.9 cm
Collection Art Gallery of Ontario,Toronto, Purchase Frank
P. Wood Endowment, 1956
Photo: © 2012 Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto
14 Edgar Degas
Paysage, c. 1892
Landscape
Pastel, 42 x 55 cm
Collection Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski
Photo: © Galerie Krugier & Cie, Geneva / Sparte, Geneva
15 Edgar Degas
Le Vésuve, c. 1892
Vesuvius
Pastel over monotype in oil colors, plate 25 x 30 cm
E.W.K., Bern
Photo: © Collection E.W.K., Bern
16 Edgar Degas
Bords de rivière, c. 1890
River Banks
Pastel over monotype in oil colors, plate 29.9 x 40.1 cm
Private collection
17 Edgar Degas
Danseuses, c. 1890
Dancers, Pink and Green
Oil on canvas, 82.2 x 75.6 cm
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,
H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of
Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929
Photo: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York / bpk
18 Edgar Degas
Devant le miroir, c. 1889
In Front of the Mirror
Pastel, 49 x 64 cm
Hamburger Kunsthalle
Photo: © Hamburger Kunsthalle / bpk / Elke Walford
19 Edgar Degas
Avant l’entrée en scène, c. 1888
Before the Performance
Pastel and charcoal, 58.7 x 33 cm
Private collection, Courtesy of Nevill Keating Pictures
Photo: © 2012 Christie‘s Images Ltd
20 Edgar Degas
Danseuse, position de quatrième devant sur la jambe,
deuxième étude, modeled 1885–90
Dancer, Fourth Position Front, on Left Leg (second study)
Posthumous bronze cast of original wax sculpture,
60.3 x 36 x 37 cm
Collection of Walter and Minnie Bechtler, Switzerland
Photo: Peter Schälchli, Zurich
21 Edgar Degas
Chevaux de courses, 1884
Jockeys on Horseback
Oil on canvas, 44.9 x 54.9 cm
Detroit Institute of Arts, Gift of W. Warren and Virginia
Shelden in Memory of Mrs. Allan Shelden
Photo: Detroit Institute of Arts / Bridgeman
22 Edgar Degas
Femme au tub, c. 1883
Woman in a Tub
Pastel, 70 x 70 cm
Tate, Bequeathed by Mrs. A. F. Kessler, 1983
Photo: © 2012 Tate, London
23 Edgar Degas
La Classe de ballet, 1880–1900
Ballet class
Oil on canvas, 62 x 50.5 cm
Private collection
Photo: SIK-ISEA, Zurich, J.-P. Kuhn
24 Edgar Degas
Autoportrait dans sa bibliothèque (portrait en buste
dans le fond), c. 1895
Self-Portrait in Library
Gelatin silver printing-out print, 6.3 x 8.1 cm
Private collection, San Francisco
Photo: © Private collection
Press images http://pressimages.fondationbeyeler.ch
This visual material may be used for press purposes only. Reproduction is permitted for the duration of the exhibition only. Please employ
the captions as given and the relevant copyrights. We kindly request you to forward us a voucher copy.
FONDATION BEYELER
Biography
Edgar Degas, 1834–1917
1834
Hilaire Germain Edgar De Gas is born in Paris on 19 July, the oldest of five children born to
Auguste De Gas, a wealthy banker, and his wife, Marie Célestine Musson.
1845–53
Attends the prestigious Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, where his lessons include instruction
in drawing.
1847
His mother dies. He begins visiting museums in Paris.
1853
Receives permission to copy works in the Louvre and in the Prints and Drawings Department
of the Bibliothèque nationale. He focuses chiefly on items by Leonardo da Vinci,
Michelangelo, and other Italian Renaissance artists. Complying with his father’s wishes, he
enrolls at the Paris Law Faculty, but will not complete his studies there.
1855
Art collector Edouard Valpinçon introduces him to the 75-year-old Jean Auguste Dominique
Ingres, whom he reveres. He will remember the encounter for the rest of his life. In April he
receives one of the hotly contended places to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, but
soon leaves.
1856–59
Spends nearly three years in Italy, during which he produces hundreds of studies after Italian
paintings of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. On his return to Paris, he leaves his
father’s home and moves into a studio in the rue Laval, not far from the boulevard de Clichy.
1860–65
Engages intensively with history painting, creating pictures on biblical, literary, historical, and
mythological subjects. At the same time he begins producing studies of horses, jockeys, and
racecourse scenes, subject matter that will occupy him for the rest of his career. In 1862 he
meets Edouard Manet. This marks the beginning of a long-standing artistic association.
Manet introduces him to the group of artists later known as the Impressionists.
1866
He abandons history painting. Over the next two decades he will focus almost entirely on
subjects drawn from daily life in Paris: scenes at the races, opera, ballet, and theater or in
concert halls, cafés, fashion houses, galleries, museums, laundries, and brothels.
1869
Works for the first time in pastel, a medium that will come to occupy a central place in his
oeuvre.
1870
Volunteers for the National Guard when France declares war on Prussia. Like Manet, he is
assigned to an artillery division.
1871
Produces his first studies of ballet dancers at the Paris Opéra. They will become a major
focus of his work, depicted in a wide variety of compositions and poses. He is alarmed by the
first signs of trouble with his eyesight.
1872
Visits his mother’s family in Louisiana, remaining in the U.S.A. for several months.
1874
His father dies. This plunges the family into financial difficulties. As the eldest, unmarried
son, he has to bear the brunt of supporting the family. This forces him to promote the sale of
his work more vigorously than before. He takes an active part in organizing the first exhibition
of a group of artists who soon become widely known as ”Impressionists.” The show is poorly
received by the public, but some critics review his contributions favorably.
1878
The museum at Pau in southwestern France purchases an oil painting by him. This is the
first work of his to enter a public collection.
1881
At the Sixth Impressionist Exhibition he shows a sculpture for the first time: Petite danseuse
de quatorze ans, a wax figure of a ballet dancer featuring real clothes and hair. The public is
scandalized by its unvarnished naturalism and lifelike presence.
ca. 1884
He begins focusing intensively on images of women washing, drying themselves, and so
forth. They will join ballet dancers as one of the most important subjects in his oeuvre.
1885
Continues paying frequent visits to the Opéra, where he is one of the few people allowed
behind the scenes during performances.
1886
At the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition his nudes attract the greatest attention, along
with Georges Seurat’s painting Un dimanche à la Grande Jatte. Most critics discuss them,
whether favorably or not. Henceforth he turns his back on the art world, and very few
authorized solo exhibitions of his work will take place during the rest of his life.
1892
The Durand-Ruel gallery in Paris mounts its first solo exhibition of his work, consisting of a
selection of landscape monotypes created since 1890.
1893
Begins devoting himself increasingly to the expansion of his art collection, acquiring in
subsequent years works by El Greco, Ingres, Eugène Delacroix, Honoré Daumier, Edouard
Manet, Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and others.
1894
His constantly deteriorating eyesight renders work more and more difficult. Yet he continues
to produce pastels and charcoal drawings of dancers and women at their toilet, while also
making sculptures.
1895
In this year—and possibly the next—he devotes much time to portrait photography,
producing pictures that show acquaintances and friends alone or in groups, usually in
interiors.
1897
He has become increasingly reclusive. His isolation grows when he proclaims his antiDreyfus stance in the affair surrounding the alleged treason of Jewish army officer Alfred
Dreyfus—a standpoint contrary to that of many intellectuals and artists.
1908
He has continued to produce drawings and pastels testifying to his undiminished interest in
portraiture, racecourse scenes, washerwomen, milliners, and, above all, ballet dancers and
female nudes at their toilet. But now, almost totally blind, he abandons painting and drawing.
He turns to sculpture, creating wax studies of dancers, women washing, racehorses, and
other subjects that will not be cast in bronze until after his death.
1912
His international reputation continues to grow: in this and the following years work by him will
repeatedly be shown at exhibitions in France, other European countries, and the U.S.A.
Gradually, his work also enters major private collections in Europe and the U.S.A. Imminent
demolition of the building at 37, rue Victor-Massé (formerly the rue Laval), in which he has
lived and worked for twenty-two years forces him to move. He finds a new home at 6,
boulevard de Clichy, but abandons all artistic activity. In his final years he lives a highly
reclusive life, receiving very few visitors.
1917
On September 27, Edgar Degas dies of the consequences of a stroke. The following day
many fellow artists attend his burial in the family vault at the Cimetière du Nord in
Montmartre.
Quotations from Edgar Degas
Source: Fondation Beyeler and Martin Schwander (eds.), Edgar Degas, exh. cat. of the Fondation
Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, 30 September 2012 – 27 January 2013, Ostfildern, 2012
"I would like to be both illustrious and unknown!" p. 11
"I’m going to show you some veritable orgies of colour that I’m doing at the moment." p. 21
Source: George T. M. Shackelford and Xavier Rey (eds.), Degas and the Nude, exh. cat., Museum of
Fine Arts, Boston, and the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, 2011/12
"Make a drawing, start it all over again, trace it. Start and trace it again." p. 166
Source: Ambroise Vollard, Degas: An Intimate Portrait, New York, 1937
"You know how much I hate to sell my work. Besides, I always hope eventually to do better."
p. 62
"People call me the painter of dancing girls. It has never occurred to them that my chief
interest in dancers lies in rendering movement and painting pretty clothes.” p. 87
Source: Edgar Degas, “Je veux regarder par le trou de la serrure.” Textes, lettres et propos choisis,
Paris, 2012
“In the past, the nude has always been represented in poses that presuppose an audience,
but my women are simple creatures. I show them without coquettishness, like animals that
are cleaning themselves […] It is as if you were looking through the keyhole."
"It is strange, for I assure you no art was ever less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the
result of reflection and study of the great masters; of inspiration, spontaneity, temperament I
know nothing…”
Source: Daniel Halévy, Degas parle…, Paris and Geneva, 1960
"Form is within the line not on the line.
Shadow lies on the line not beside the line […]" p. 59
"Idleness! It is the most wonderful thing in the world provided you don’t suffer from it." p. 73
Quotations about Edgar Degas
Paul Valéry in his book Degas danse dessin (1938), Paris, 1998
"[Degas ] liked and appreciated photography at a time when artists disdained it or dared not
admit they made use of it." p. 60
Pierre Auguste Renoir quoted by Ambroise Vollard in his book Recollections of a Picture Dealer,
Mineola, New York, 1978
"If Degas had died at fifty, he would have been remembered as an excellent painter, no
more; it was after his fiftieth year that his work broadens out, that he really becomes Degas."
p. 320
Pierre Auguste Renoir quoted by Ambroise Vollard in his book Degas : An Intimate Portrait, New York,
1937
"There was a nude by Degas I shall never forget…It was the only thing you wanted to look at
in the entire room… It was like a frieze of the Parthenon.” p. 69
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