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Degas: Melancholy Prisoner of His Art |
| Section: THE ARTS / ART |
| Author: Michael Gibson |
| Publication: The world & I online |
| Issue Date: 6/1/1988 |
| Size: 1,892 Words, 11,270 Characters |
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Degas' work may strike one as both utterly transparent and strangely impenetrable. The subject matter, after all, could hardly be more straightforward: portraits, nudes, horses, women washing themselves or working. Yet as one walks through the exhibition of close to four hundred works assembled by the French Museums, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, one cannot help feeling there may be more to Degas' work than meets the eye.
A self-portrait of Edgar Degas at the age of twenty-one seems to offer a clue to the man's character and, in an almost prophetic sense, to what was to be the pattern of his life. The lower part of the face, with its sulky, adolescent mouth, is that of a resentful youth tormented with self-doubt. In stark co...
. . .
...life.
This sort of observation would be irrelevant to his art were it not that the nostalgic regret he occasionally expressed perhaps lent a heightened poignancy to his depiction of women, imbued it with this added increment of realism that, as in the dream experience, not only makes everything appear so persuasive but also suggests that a latent message waits to be read and understood.
(806 of 11,270 characters)
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