Final years of Edgar Degas

In 1884 Degas reached the age of 50 and confessed to his friends that he felt some disillusionment about his career. Already known for his abrasiveness toward visitors during working hours, he became notorious for his single-minded dedication to the making of art and for his hostility to journalists and the merely curious. The next decade was one of continuous invention, as he gradually refined his artistic ambitions and shed the preoccupations of his middle years. He abandoned many of the topical themes of the 1870s—the café-concerts, shop scenes, and brothels, for example—and replaced them with a new phase of concentration on the human figure in intimate, if more indistinct, settings. After a controversial sequence of pastels in the 1886 Impressionist exhibition, which showed women bathing and drying themselves indoors and in the open air, Degas produced hundreds of obsessive studies of the nude female form on paper and canvas or in wax and clay. While some of the earlier scenes had been considered voyeuristic and the models identified as prostitutes, these later figures avoid easy classification. The figure in The Morning Bath ( 1887/90) is almost monumental in the manner of the antique sculpture he admired, while others seem overtly sensual or burdened by their massiveness.

The second great subject of Degas’s later years was the dancer, now infrequently on stage or in compromising situations but rather more often waiting in the wings. He hired models to pose in his studio for both his ballet and bathing scenes, often freely improvising his settings or utilizing familiar props. Though they never became abstract in any sense that Degas would have understood, the works of this period moved significantly away from the urban context that had formerly inspired him. His late pictures of dancers are essentially engagements with the human form, at times in rhythmic relationships with each other’s bodies, and at times expressing a forceful individual presence. In a large oil painting of about 1900, Dancers at the Barre, for example, Degas created a vital equilibrium between the energy of the two women in a tense composition of verticals and diagonals and of green skirts and orange walls.

In such works Degas seemed to be confronting the beginnings of a new art, where documentary description counts for little and the preoccupations with structure and expression of the early 20th century are spelled out. As in his nude studies, his pastels of dancers were sometimes lightly tinted over an energetic charcoal drawing, or were otherwise densely built up in crusty layers of brilliant, unnatural hue. The old dialogue between color and line continued but in an emphatically modern idiom. A fascination with varied techniques haunted Degas to the end, resurfacing in dramatic and unusual late canvases that involved finger-painting, glazes of contrasting color, and heavily impastoed surfaces.

The audacity of Degas’s art during this period was often at odds with the narrowness of his life. In 1890 he took over a large studio on the rue Victor Massé, later moving into an adjoining apartment that was to remain his home until 1912. He never married but was a fiercely loyal friend, counting among his intimates a number of women, including Mary Cassatt. Degas enjoyed society on his own terms, dining out within a trusted circle and regaling families such as Ludovic and Louise Halévy with his trenchant opinions and humorous aphorisms on art, literature, and politics. His letters from these years are typically brief and businesslike but occasionally allow glimpses of a melancholy, strong-willed personality. Degas relished the company of the young, from small children to the new generation of writers and artists who increasingly sought him out. With Paul Gauguin, for example, he exchanged both ideas and works of art, learning much from the younger man’s views on color while also prompting Gauguin to make experimental prints and boldly drawn figure compositions. Degas himself remained somber in appearance, wearing a dark suit and top hat on formal occasions and remaining aloof from the mores of bohemianism.

Despite many myths about Degas’s later years, some encouraged by the artist himself, he did not (until the very end) retreat from the art world, but rather he promoted his work energetically and closely followed the careers of perceived rivals such as Monet and Cézanne. In 1892 he staged a much-noted exhibition of his landscape monotypes at the Durand-Ruel Gallery, partly as a riposte to Monet’s gathering fame and the recent success of Pissarro’s and Cassatt’s own prints. Becoming an avid collector, he also acquired the art of many of his contemporaries, as well as hundreds of drawings and paintings by his lifelong idols, Delacroix and Ingres. And, while he remained loyal to his Montmartre studio when his contemporaries painted abroad or in their country retreats, he also traveled regularly through France, Switzerland, and Italy (his last visit was in 1906, at age 72) to visit acquaintances and make occasional landscapes. His world began to narrow at the turn of the 20th century, however, partly because of his reactionary views and violently anti-Semitic response to the Dreyfus affair, which alienated many of his friends. His declining health also began to preoccupy him; although Degas never went completely blind, a complex of eye troubles obliged him to wear dark glasses outdoors and take frequent rests from work. (His emphasis on the strikingly simplified yet eloquent forms of his final decades was partly linked to his declining sight.)

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In an unusual move for an artist of his renown, Degas gave up work in old age after being obliged to move from his last studio in 1912. Suffering from reduced sight and hearing, he surrounded himself with pictures he had made and collected, retreating into his memories. His reputation in France and beyond grew steadily, with his work reaching prices of unprecedented heights and beginning to enter major museums. With his cooperation, dealers such as Paul Durand-Ruel and Ambroise Vollard placed pictures from all periods with leading collectors, among them the American Louisine Havemeyer, the Russian Shchukin family, and the German Count Harry Kessler. Degas was idolized by artists of several early 20th-century persuasions—including Suzanne Valadon, Walter Richard Sickert, Maurice Denis, Georges Rouault, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Edward Hopper—who visited his studio or emulated him from afar.

It was not until after Degas’s death in 1917, however, that the wealth of his output was revealed in a succession of vast public sales in the war-shocked Paris of 1918 and 1919. Thousands of his previously unexhibited works on paper and canvas were sold, and some of the later, less naturalistic examples distressed even his most loyal admirers. Certain aspects of his achievement gained prominence for the first time, principally the wide range of his printmaking. Also surprising was the extent of his collection of pictures by El Greco, Ingres, Delacroix, Manet, Gauguin, and Cézanne. In the early 1920s, when the first series of posthumous bronze casts were unveiled in Europe and the United States, Degas’s sculpture provided a further revelation to the art world.