The Life and Art of Edgar Degas || Art History Explained

Edgar Degas remains one of the most celebrated and controversial Impressionist painters in art history. This film tells the story of a visionary artist who made it his life's work to capture the vibrant, fleeting world of 19th-century Paris, from smoky bars and cafés to circuses, racecourses and the dancers the corps de ballet at the Paris Opéra. Nearly half of his oil paintings and pastel works depict ballerinas practicing, performing or at rest. With a sharp and attentive gaze, Degas immortalised the most intimate and transient moments of human life in paintings, pastels and sculptures in images that continue to fascinate audiences to this day. Degas himself once wrote about the off-guard quality of his work, “It is as if you looked through the keyhole.” Born in 1834 into a wealthy family whose banking riches spread from Paris to Naples, Edgar Degas was brought up in privileged surroundings and took to art from an early age. As his art developed, he made little attempt to idealise his subjects, often contravening traditional techniques by cropping his pictures in sudden places and choosing asymmetry over conventional compositions. In doing so, he became one of the most original and daring artistic voices of the Impressionist movement, alongside contemporaries such as Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Camille Pissarro. But who was the man behind the masterpieces? Degas was an artist unapologetically candid about the realities of his era, and like all the most arresting artists, his personality was complex, contradictory and full of fascinating nuance.