Invitation to Art; 19; Edgar Degas

... ... ... ... ... ... ... I don't think it would have liked him very much. He didn't like dogs and he didn't like flowers and he didn't like women. And I don't think he liked himself very much either at times. He was capable of warmth and kindness and generosity. But he hated so much to show it that he appeared bitter and ironic and cruel. He had a very bitter and harsh tongue. And maybe that's why he had so few friends. He often strikes me, you know, like one of those old batteries with positive and negative pulls. Like love and hate with a spark passing continually one from the other as if to embrace one where to forsake the other.

Now his name, of course, was Edgar Degas. And you can realize something of what I mean when you hear him talk about art, which he loved. Art is vice. It is not to be embraced in lawful wedlock but rape. And again, he who says art say sacrifice. Art is treacherous and cruel. Well now in old age when he was aware of his own effects he wrote, I was her seem to be harsh against all the world because brutality became a habit of mind. Born of my distrust and myself and my ill-humour, I have felt so badly equipped, so soft, in spite of the fact that my attitude towards art seemed to me just. I quarreled with all the world and with myself. The elements were very mixed in. I mean very mixed indeed. He was capable of prejudice. He was quite anti-Semitic. And maybe it takes a Yiddish word to describe him.

He was a bit of a sedret there. He was a bit of a mixed up one. But that always means conflict. And out of conflict comes tension. And his art sublimates those moments of tension. Through struggle, always through struggle with the garr. And it's that quality of struggle that gives his art that little quickening, that little sharp edge that you always see in his greatest work. Well now we're going to see a great talent progress to greatness. And it's fascinating to watch it all the little byroads the cul-de-sacs he might have gone down but didn't. No, he went to where he wanted to go and his honesty brought him through. Well let's start pretty close to the beginning. He was 33 when he painted this. These are his Italian relatives. That's his sister. The Duke and Duchess of Morby. And there's a lot of the classical in this. Anger of course was the great influence, the great classicist whom the garr adored. He studied with the pupil of his.

And they tell the story one time. It's a story that has become famous. That Ang met the garr. And he said draw lines young men, many lines, either from memory or from nature. That is the way you will become a great and noble artist, a great and noble artist. Very elevated, very classic. Well you might say that Ang gave the garr a line. He did. The garr took that line and became, if you want to make a horrible penalty, became an angry and young man. Well now here is the influence of Ang, very much shown in that outline. That wonderfully subtle outline surrounding these faces. Very subtle contour is holding in these faces. With an exquisite sort of modulation. You know this line that both takes shape from what it contains and gives shape to it. It's a wonderful given take. And it's wonderfully rhythmic and harmonic and refined. And you know you can really see it all in his sister's head. Now this is the sister here. And how magnificent this is. And the point of view is style alone.

This is almost perfect symmetry. This echoing collection of ovals, the hair bisected, the face, the eyebrows, the matching eyes, the little apertures of the nostrils, keeping time to the stylistic impulse and the mouth too. And the fingers on the cheek following the line of it. You know it's like music. It's wonderful. It's clean. It's regular. It's classic. It's considered. Now there is one other oval shadow on this face. And I wonder if you've seen it. The left side of her face so subtly that you have to look twice to see what causes it. Well her husband's head is in the light. And the shadow of this falls on her cheek. And you know I pointed out this to our lighting man a moment ago just before we started the show and he said, you know that's really bad lighting though. Well it's a wonderful little inspiration that shadow because it plays its part in the very gentle movement of shadows around that face. That is it plays its part formally. But it also plays it psychologically showing the relationship between the two people. The way she is recessed back, drawn into the shadow

and the way he comes forward assertively. It's wonderful. You know it's almost as if he were posing alone coming forward. And you see how this man is telling us by visual means alone. The artist means the relationship between these two people or what he thinks is the relationship between this husband and this wife. He comes forward very much. Look at that line there. That almost broke line of the elbow as it comes forward and takes position of the table and culminates in that that is sort of hand. You know this is all angles. Angles of elbows, angles of knees, angles all over the table, the chair. The guy is often angles. Here with a sense of calm purpose. But later on he's greatest work with a sense of tawny insistency. Wonderful. Wonderful. You know when I look at this I just see three main things. I see the two heads. And here seems to be the sort of center of the composition from which everything radiates out. That hand that is hanging the solid and vanged and powerful which seems to summarize the Duke's character

like an epigram almost. Well these are easy Italian relatives. And his grandfather you know fled from France during the terror. There were very reactionary young people, very conservative or bankers they were, very conservative background rebel. Well now they went away and the guy visited them quite often. And he painted his relatives now and then. And he always didn't exhibit them. This was found in his studio after his death face turned towards the wall. The family was a thing for this man that you don't put up, that you don't exhibit in the real meaning of the world. You know this is for yourself. You see here's another conflict with this extraordinary man. He doesn't like to reveal himself. Revealing his feelings is like exposing his nerves to him. He doesn't like to put too much of himself into his paintings. What a conflict that is for an artist who's very, oh who's very purpose is to transfer a feeling, to bear his nerves. So you can see how this pushes him in a way to a certain type of subject

where he is unobserved. For instance the ballet, the race course, the spectacle. So a sight like this is all the more unusual in his art when we see it. This early picture too, which also was found in his studio after his death turned towards the wall. And it's his father listening to Pagans playing the guitar. Pagans was a popular singer and guitarist. And he was a friend and he often came to the house. And that wonderful Monday night there. Now this old hit of his father tells a lot about the guy. He's a sympathetic and it's warm and affectionate outline there against the music stand of the piano. It's like a square halo. It's a listening meditative sort of head. Now here's something strange. You see the guy who was so careful to keep himself hidden like many shy constrained people. He has a deep sensitivity towards the inner life of his city. And that combined with the intense driving intellectual analysis reveals his father and also himself.

Well now five years have passed since the last picture we saw and there's an immense difference. The Duke and the Duchess, they're formal. The classic angry and lying tending towards the ideal. And they're posed and they're posing and they're aware of us and we are aware of them. While with Pagans and his father they are unaware of us. You see this is more intimate. We are unobserved but we're observing. And here's a switch. And a switch like this doesn't happen for nothing. You see it means a change. A change in the artist's mind in his attitude towards these models. And to what he paints. And another thing, the beautiful contrast of colors, each confined to an area definitely bounded by an edge and a border align is being lost in this picture. This is more real in a word. And you see here struggling through the great classic and ideal tradition is a new vision much less heroic and it's merely what he has seen. You see remember, this is 1872. And by this time the great realist, Corbeis,

he's one of few battles. And although Corbeis sweating realism didn't attract so thoroughbred a painter as de Gaar. Now we're coming to the conflicts you see out of which this great painter arose. Is this tremendous feeling for line and for light and shade at war with a realistic impulse? He has a great impulse to paint what he sees. So he became eventually a sort of realist. And then he becomes a sort of impressionist. And in the end he becomes a sort of expressionist. You see always he never submits himself fully to other people. He remains what he wants himself. The impressionist said let's go out in the open air and let's paint from nature. And de Gaar said no, nature is of no importance. You can imagine I'm saying it in that doorway. And then he went indoors and slammed the door. He didn't like man, either. He's all right. I mean, he didn't like his art very much. And he didn't like Monet. He found his pictures too drafty. He said, had it been any more drafty? Had it been any worse? I'd have had to turn up my coat collar.

It's wonderful. So now here's an individual going towards his individual go. And it becomes more objective. Much more objective. So he develops a point of view that cuts literally slices out of life. That cuts slices out of life and presents them to us. By sex life almost brutally. So he by sex as it were people and places and things and pulls them by the heels into his pictures. As he does in this, as he does the horses in this. Look at that. The frame is almost like a surgeon's knife, which amputates anything that overlaps it. And I suppose here we can talk about the camera and the influence of the camera and the glimpse of life that Impressionism had as one of its aims. Well, he takes this fleeting glimpse of life idea all right. And like Suzanne, with another aspect of Impressionism, he makes of this glimpse something solid, something prominent. You know, this here is one of my favorite details. See them, the two women under the umbrella with a baby

and the driver and the dog looking down, all sharply outlined, that line is there still, rejecting the softening of the atmosphere and cutting through straight to our eyes. You can feel it as you look. Now that line involves, really, logically, a certain isolation of each object in a somewhat airless space. So later we'll see the guy working towards the unification of his pictures, bringing them all into one glimpse through atmosphere and that is an Impressionist idea all right. And by the way, that black dog, he's just marvelous. He's very important to the picture, and he's more than just a dog, really. He's a black projection, which very daringly breaks the line of the carriage and pins your eye down a bit and your eye continually comes back to focus on him. And from him then, the eye continually again sort of falls away into that delightful well of the carriage. You know, I always think the placing of that dog there could be only the guy.

It's like a signature. Well, this, of course, is carriage with the racers and it's painted about 1873. And over the riders, they are in the mid-distance. And by the way, they're quite sharply defined still, aren't they? That line is still defining things. Well, beyond them, there's the distant shimmer of tense in the race course. And here again, then, as we go over, we're cut off by the frame, amputated again. And as you see, half a carriage goes with it, including three of the horse's legs. I always enjoy that. You know, as if the man were driving a one-legged horse. And really, the view of reality is coming into a very sharp focus here in carriage of the racers. And you know, we look at this scene and we look away again and then when you look back, you're almost expected to have changed. Does the expectation of change of motion? That open space there to the left center seems to have widened as the carriage draws out of the picture. And you see what we're getting now is not the, oh, what?

The grave, equipoise of classic art. It's the sense of potential motion that dagar from now on cultivates. And the carriage seems to be on its way out, way out of the picture. And it's that sense of expectation of tension, which dagar lifts out of life and that he's objectified as a search on, like a scientist. And by the way, the lucidity and clarity of this is marvelous. It's a little jewel. These cool colors under that special sky. Now, this sense of motion and movement towards which he's working, you can see perfectly in this little drawing here, the little agitation and searching of these few strokes of the crayon. You see, he's searching out the outline, he's searching out the form to express the movement of the jockey, the twist of his body, the inclination of it. And I always have, when I look at this, impression that he's just rang in, you know, just pulled in the horse. Now, the excitement and the ripple and the movement in these few lines, you know, they really bring you behind the formal front of a canvas, into the area of the picture's genesis,

because a drawing really is like a page of a diary. It's like looking over a man's shoulder as he writes. Well, time passes. And we have race sources. It's a few years later than the carriage of the races. And the outline now is beginning to be lost in a hint of atmosphere. In a shimmer, do you see that? A shimmer which ever so slightly softens the outlines of the jockey's jackets and brings this picture into an increasing unity in that shallow space. You know, your counselor got deep into it. There's nothing very exciting about it. That flat sloping horizon. You know, it all adds up to the sense of something seen and put down mechanically with the sort of perversity, you see. Digga occasionally, especially early on, he accentuates the boredom of what we see. The slice of life is often tasteless.

And we're all just saying the wonder with which the artist sees the world, you know, of sensation and perception. But the artist may be a cynic. And the thing seen, maybe, banal. Now, this is the casual glimpse, which to me has a lot of that inner vision. But it's the casual glimpse which is put together as cuffly as a Swiss watch to produce this effect. Now, just watch. Do you see the two horses here like two pillars to the right? Two grave pillars. And do you notice that little turn of the horses head towards the left? That's the artist's guiding hand on the bridle, as it were, pushing us over towards this central horse and rider, shaped in silhouette, like a large, a regular pointer towards the left again to this agitated horse and jockey. Do you see how they progress in quietness to agitation? And which again turns us, the horse there turns us to the left, and we hit against the frame now, but our eye refuses to go out, because we have a natural inclination to read from left to right.

So we follow the irregular group diminishing inward to the center and to the distance. And this impulse is resisted too by that falling line of dreams. Now, do you see how in this apparently casual picture, everything is considered, everything is weighed. And the god said that, he said, no art is less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of memory and the study of the great masters as for inspiration, spontaneity, temperament. I know nothing of them, he said, above all he's a thinking painter. Thinking man's painter. Well now, the god also became a sort of impressionist. So we have to add to these conflicts of line and light and shade and realism, light. And the vibration of light becoming color, all those equal and opposing forces which are claiming his attention. And you know, the god never seemed to realize that in a position like that, anything you can do is compromise.

He couldn't compromise, he'd never have made a politician. You see, he tried the impossible to digar, but this is his greatness, he achieved it. Well now realism, I suppose, means a certain sort of objectivity and a certain sort of dispassionate analysis. And with the accent on analysis, digar goes beyond mere realism. He goes beyond mere realism and he takes the whole world as his laboratory for his experiments. He takes the world apart and he puts it together again. And his main laboratory becomes one of the warmest of human sites. He turns this cold analytical eye of his on the ballet. And he thinks that people, or he says that people think I like painting ballet girls for themselves, and he says no. Well they don't realize is my interest in ballet girls is due to rendering motion, my interest in rendering motion and in painting pretty, pretty dresses. You see, he lays bare the awkward mechanism of motion, which the ballet dancer spends years learning to conceal, slight brutality in that, isn't it?

Well now he had his doubts about his sculpture. This is the only one he showed during his lifetime. He survived by sculpture and bronze. He said what a responsibility. Bronze is so very prominent. And then in a fit of peaky one said, I never seem to achieve anything with my blasted sculpture. You know, then you almost like him. But this is wonderful, this little girl. How marvelous she is standing there. Almost how real she is. And really, if you were to go one step further with this, he has achieved his end so well, that if you were to go one step further, that would be too much. You'd have lost out. The border between art and nature would have been transgressed. You see, his indirect method of capturing the casual. Well, he succeeded so well, I think, that he almost failed. It's only when you keep looking at this, that you find the immense art behind it. And you feel the awkward tension in every muscle and sinew in this,

guided by the little girl's intent will, she's concentrating. Now, here he chose as a child struggling with the pose, rather than the finished ballerina in complete control of the body. After an intense discipline, a discipline indeed, as intense as that, which Degas imposed on himself. And with results in the dancer of an infinite sort of grace, you see, our eyes are brought around her motion and movement through a series of movements that add up to something that affects us by a rhythm, a rhythm that's basic to all the arts. You see, they move us all through rhythm. This is wonderful. Rhythm, harmony, proportion, order, whatever you like to call it. And if this one can really say, in action, how like an angel, in form and motion, how express and admirable. But, when the dancer comes down from her points and walks away from the performance, with that sort of flat-footed gate,

which ballet dancers seem to develop, the grace drops away. And we see the bare mechanics of transportation. And these were the moments that Degas delighted in capturing and analyzing and reconstructing until the bones of the action are revealed through the gesture. Look at this. Look at the quality of the line here. Acid lines. My heavens, this is wonderful. They're full of strength and bite. And they have even a certain ferocity, which Degas lines indeed have at time. They go deep here. They go really deep. You can look at them and you can feel the violence and putting them down. And you know, see how they guide the figure into motion, into its pose. They chart the motion like a graph. This is great. It's wonderful. You see, too, there's a lot of simplification. You see a broad plane. It's noted tail. It's a further development. It does that a lot later on. And now we see some of the full development of the cut-off snapshot point of view. See, one figure legs ahead. Another hasn't got a leg. And throughout everything, perhaps because of this, there's an emphasis on design. There's a superb equilibrium here that makes us hold our breath.

You know, it's like a man watching, walking a tightrope to see Degas pictures. Can you bring it off, you always sort of say, you know? Now, see, there's a rough quadrangle here of the skirt in the center, belonging to the girl whose head is cut off. And you see around it, there's a superb ordered point and counterpoint of limbs and tosses. The superb Degas makes the dancer dance to his own tune. And it's this deliberate sort of eternal transgression of music. Of beauty, it's like music, you know, like modern music, like Schoenberg's music, that he most concentrates on. Well, now, the perversity of stripping this most elegant creature of grace was something that appealed to him. And in this attitude, there's a slight tinge, isn't there, of romantic pessimism. And here's another paradox about this man, as well as the classic dowry of Angra, Degas admired de la croix,

the great romantic. And the admired his color very much. See, all the evidences of the divided mind, all the conflicts. Now, let's see how she's ended up. A dancer, at rest, far from the graces of performance now tired, and as we could say, I'm caring of elegance. And then, just at that moment, the pitiless eye of Degas lights on her, and she becomes included in one of his greatest masterpieces. See how simplified it is, the contrast of dark, shawl, and light skirt. He's a great feeling for these contrasts, very few details again, by the way. And this is not a representation, but a synthesis of the goal, a summary. And he moves towards this summary of form and later life, as he himself said, painting as a conventional art. Now, the wonderful likeness of this picture. Do you see that wonderful powder-puff explosion of the skirt? Is in part due to the fact that there's more light in his painting.

And now, around this time, it's 1880, he turns to this medium of pastel, because he's sight is failing, just like many did in his old age. He's sight is failing, and he turns to this medium, and it solves a lot of his problems, because you can use the line in it, and the line doesn't become lost, you see. And you can elaborate with color, and the form is not lost either, so it solved a lot of his problems in itself. And I think that at this point, that great phrase of denuncius is very relevant to him, when he said denuncius that color is the striving of matter to become light. That's wonderful. The striving of matter to become light. And indeed, in the impressionist iridescence, the influence of impressionist light in this, there is still that wonderful sense of form, that wonderful sense of body and matter coming through, which is really marvelous. There's a hard one synthesis here. You know, all these components, these organic components light, and color in line, and form, all these things light and dark,

they come together to make a sheet of paper just like this. So precious. This is a superb. You know, we could talk about the composition here, this daring composition, and the influence of Japanese prints, and all that sort of thing, which brings things to the surface, by the way, and yet ambiguously here, as you look, leaves an impression of depth. You see, there's so much to talk about with this man. And in 30 short minutes, we can only give you a picture of him that it's sort of cut off, just as the dances are cut off by his pictures. Now, let's look at one of the climaxes of this great artist's work, what he's working to, a picture like this around 1888, when he painted with a fear of darkness on him, the fear of blindness. And you see the essence of the guy here, the angular composition. You know, talking about the guy, I often think he's all elbows. And, literally, he's all elbows here, seemingly again, the perverse pose, the accidental pose, but everything's as careful as mathematics. Look, there's just one piece of evidence for this. See, we just take one piece. Do you see the elbow here, which is echoed faithfully by the line of the stage scenery there,

which reinforces it, which echoes it, and turns this into a motif, a rhythm. And it's all irradiated with color, it's wonderful. Beginning to have a depth of its own, two, the same confusion of depth and surface that was in the other picture. And here, with that two, because he wants that, because he wants that, is that triumphant solution to the forces that pull him apart. You know, he's a great natural colorist. Line was his love, and he never seemed to realize that he was a great colorist. And he'd rather look down and color you now. Well, it only remains for us to take you to the threshold of his final silence before he came blind. And he painted those last great nudes, which are in a way the climax of the researchers, he made into the human body, into its movement, into its mechanism, and the light which already existed, the line which bounds it, they're wonderful, those last nudes, broad and blazing with color.

Look at this one coiled up, your eye goes around it, it's marvelous. And you know, they are, really what they are, is from this solitary man, a great outburst of prayers, almost at times desperate prayers of life itself. It's energy and it's splendid and terrible vitality. In this, it's in this. They express you see the depths, the mountains, the abyssus in the spirit of a great artist. And so in the end, the garg comes to a kind of expression. Perhaps I was wrong, he said, towards the end of his life. Perhaps I was wrong in considering women too much as an animal, to be used for his own artistic purposes. And you know when he begins to admit his false, we begin to like him more. Although I don't think we would have liked him very much you and I, but we are in his debt, because he succeeded, as he said,

in summing up life in its essential gestures. Music Music Music This is NET, National Educational Television.

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