Degas: Painting from Memory and Imagination

Degas: Painting from Memory and Imagination Àt the moment, it is fashionable to paint pictures where you can see what time it is, like on a sundial, I don't like that at all. A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people. Even working from life, you most compose. Some people think it is forbidden!' ` On this subject, Monet told me: When Jongkind needed a house or a tree, he would turn round and take them from behind him.' ( Memories of Degas, Georges Jeanniot) Unlike the most of his contemporaries, Degas was an Impressionist who did not derive pleasure from painting at plein air where the painter is exposed to natural light. Instead, he always preferred to work in his studio, mainly from memory, with his desirable artificial type of light which was an indispensable factor of almost all of his paintings, the brown sauce as he called it. The question is why he had chosen that unique captivating style of painting from memory and how his imagination helped him to push back the boundaries of suffering and find his way to absolute freedom in the way of illustration. Ingres's Influence Degas's artistic life can be divided in three different eras [7]. The apprentice years (1850-1870), the Impressionists era (1870-1885) and the late maturity (1886-1912). During the apprentice years, he was influenced by both contemporary and old masters. Ingres for example, the French Neo-Classicist painter, played an important role as a mentor in shaping Degas's artistic character. Degas studied drawing with Louis Lamothe who was a pupil of Ingres. Ingres's profound impact in Degas's thoughts and works is an indisputable fact; Degas idolized Ingres and looked upon Ingres as the first star in the firmament of French art [2]. They met each other a few times; but Ingres's advice through the short conversations taking place between them were so effective. In the first meeting, Degas was sent to ask him for the loan of a picture for an exhibition [3]. I took advantage of the opportunity to tell him that I was in love with art and would like his advice. The pictures that hung in his studio are still photographed in my mind. `Draw lines, young man', Ingres said to me. `Draw lines, whether from memory or after the nature then you will be a good artist.' Another time, Degas went to Ingres's house accompanied by Valpin¸conand carrying a portfolio under his arm [4]. Ingres looked through the drawings in it, closed it, and said: Èxcellent! Young man, never work from nature. Always draw from memory or from engraving the masters.' Degas never hid the worship of his `god'; he painted several works based on `Monsieur' Ingres's master- pieces as an apprentice and professional. His famous self-portrait based on Ingres's self portrait at the age of 22 (Figure 1) and his painting series of nudes influenced by The Valpin¸conBather (Figure 2) and Odalisque would be the persuasive evidence in this respect. Furthermore, he would admit no argument when there was any question of `Monsieur' Ingres. One day his friend Henri Rouart took upon himself to reproach the The Apotheose d'Homere, with coldness, observing that the god in it, frozen as he was into a lofty attitude, breathed an icy atmosphere. 1 Degas: Painting from Memory and Imagination `What!' Degas bursts out. `But what could be more admirable? The whole canvas is filled with the air of Empyrean.' He was forgetting that the Empyrean is a region of fire. Self Portrait, by Ingres 1804. Muséedu Self Portrait, by Edgar Degas 1855. Louvre, Paris. Musée d'Orsay, Paris. Figure 1 Drawing numerous sketches after the old masters in France and Italy, on the advice of Ingres, Degas initiated his artistic career as a history painter. The Daughter of Jephtha and War Scene in the Middle Ages are the good examples of the apprentice period. However, there was an early turning point when he preferred to use contemporary subject-matter than mythical figures. For instance, in The Young Spartans (Figure 3), there is no sign of ideal muscular human beings we can find in the works of old masters such as Raphael and Michelangelo, but the models are some young Italian or Montmartre's ordinary children [5]. Actually, the root of his drawing is as classical as Ingres's, but Degas changes the subject-matter from antiquity to the boards of the opera-house [2]. So, in short words, he could paint what he could memorize through his own eyes. Moreover, despite the fact that he was losing his eyesight, he was not a blind follower. He believed in creativity; as he said once [6]: `the secret is to follow the advice given by the masters in their work by doing something other than what they have done.' The awkward angle, off-centered composition and more importantly the motion of the subject-matter in his paintings would prove the unique style Degas held among his contemporaries. Failing Eyesight Besides Ingres's influence, there was a necessity that kept Degas away from plein air; a problem that prevented him from being outside of his atelier in daylight and copying from nature. During Degas's stay in New Orleans he wrote to Henri Rouart [7]: `the light is so strong that I have not yet been able to do anything on the river. My eyes are so greatly in need of care that I scarcely take any risk with them at all.' In another letter to Tissot [7], the French painter, Degas wrote:`What lovely things I could have done, and done rapidly if the bright daylight were less unbearable for me. To go to Louisiana to open one's eyes, I cannot do that and yet I kept them sufficiently half open to see my fill.’ These are two examples of several problems he faced regarding his eyesight that started to deteriorate after the Franco-Prussian war. In 1870, Degas was called up to serve for National Guard. As Paul Valérysaid [8], `when Degas was sent to Vincennes for rifle practice, he discovered that he could not see the target with his right eye. It was confirmed that his eye was almost useless, a fact which he, I heard all this from his own lips, blamed on a damp attic which for a long time had been his bedroom.' According to Degas and the Contingency of Vision [8], there is evidence of four separate kinds of symptoms besides his myopia: severely impaired sight in one of Degas's eyes; a marked intolerance to 2 Degas: Painting from Memory and Imagination Seated Bather Drying Herself, by Edgar Degas 1898. Private Collection. The Valpin¸conBather, by Ingres 1808. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Figure 2 Figure 3: The Young Spartans, by Edgar Degas 1860. National Gallery, London. 3 Degas: Painting from Memory and Imagination Landscape, by Edgar Degas 1890-92. Galerie Jan Krugier, Geneva. Woman having Her hair combed, by Edgar Degas 1886. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Figure 4 bright light { photophobia, whether natural or artificial; an uneven `blurring' of parts of the visual field and finally, a slightly later date; the first reference to notorious `blind spot'. Among all of these symptoms, as Degas mentioned in several letters to his friends, photophobia was the most irritating one. By that, regardless of the fact that he expressed antipathy toward painting at plein air, as an Impressionist, he was obsessed with nature; he loved to travel around the countryside and, more importantly, to paint landscapes. So, he overcame this disability by taking advantage of his extraordinary capability of painting from memory. In the early 1890s, Degas painted a series of pastel landscapes which were exhibited later in 1892 at Durand-Ruel's [11]. Explaining about these landscapes, Degas said: Ì was standing at the window of a carriage and looking vaguely at the countryside and the idea of doing some landscapes occurred to me.' Surprisingly enough, he transformed a charcoal sketch of his nude theme, that was Woman having her Hair combed, into a coastal landscape (Figure 4) [12]. Degas's unique style of painting from memory was not limited to landscape as subject-matter: he took advantage of this technique in painting one of his most favorite themes, The Dancers. He simply pictured a ballet scene in his mind after few visits to the opera-house and drew it inside his noticeably empty studio with the help of models who posed him. In simple words, he used his eyes, as a photography device, to take several snapshots of the scene and memorize them until they were transferred to a canvas. This would explain why almost all of his subject-matter was pictured as if in motion. Imagination Degas believed that painting from memory could fire imagination. As he said to Jeannot [5]: ìt is always very well to copy what you see, but much better to draw what only the memory sees. Then you get a transformation, in which imagination works hand in hand with the memory and you reproduce only what has particularly struck you {In other word, essentials; look at Delacroix.' Imagination was an indispensable part of Degas's painting practice and it was his intellectuality that kept the balance between visual perception and active imagination. It is not still clear whether or not Degas's pastels and drawings, during the Impressionist and the late maturity eras, were made from direct observation of the models posed for him.

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