Edgar Degas (1834 – 1917)
Known as Edgar Degas, was a French painter, printmaker and sculptor.
Make a drawing. Start it all over again, trace it. Start it and trace it again.
There is a kind of success that is indistinguishable from panic.
What a delightful thing is the conversation of specialists! One understands absolutely nothing and it’s charming.
Boredom soon overcomes me when I am contemplating nature.
The museums are here to teach the history of art and something more as well, for, if they stimulate in the weak a desire to imitate, they furnish the strong with the means of their emancipation.
Art is vice. One does not wed it, one rapes it.
Your pictures would have been finished a long time ago if I were not forced every day to do something to earn money.
A man is an artist only at certain moments, by an effort of will. Objects have the same appearance for everybody.
I, marry? Oh, I could never bring myself to do it. I would have been in mortal misery all my life for fear my wife might say, "That's a pretty little thing," after I had finished a picture.
Be sure to give the same expression to a person's face that you give to his body.
With what is he concerned? Drawing was at its lowest ebb; it had to be restored. Looking at these nudes, I exclaim, "Drawing has come back again!"
All Paris knew him as a fighter, a recluse, guarding his privacy with cruel, crushing words. The habitués of the Paris boulevards defended themselves against his scorn by accusing him of insincerity. "Degas," they said, "would like to see his reflection in a boulevard window in order to give himself the satisfaction of breaking the plate-glass with his cane."
Painting is not very difficult when you don't know how; but when you know, oh! then, it's another matter.
Drawing is not what you see but what you must make others see.
He was an avid collector of both old and new art; in his sixties he purchased two Gauguins, and when pushing eighty he remarked with some admiration of Cubism that "it seems even more difficult than painting."
I have often heard Degas say that in painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false.
Forain s'était construit un hôtel, et fil installer le téléphone presque nouveau. Il voulut d'abord "épater" Degas. Il l'invite ? dîner, previent un compere, qui, pendant le dîner, appelle Forain ? l'appareil. Quelque mots échangé, Forain revient. Degas lui dit: "C'est ça le téléphone? On vous sonne et vous y allez."
Comme nous avons mal fait de nous laisser appeler Impressionistes.
It isn't ideas I'm short of..I've got too many (on discussing poetry with Mallarme,who replied)'Degas ,you can't make a poem with ideas-you make it with words;
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.