Aesthetics

Degas is the most "low-key" one in Jiang Xun's aesthetic series. He didn't go anywhere like Leonardo da Vinci and Van Gogh. He was as dazzling as a star.

Descendants classified Degas as an Impressionist painter because he participated in the first famous Impressionist Art Exhibition in 1874 and had close contacts with mainstream Impressionist painters.

Degas, who was labeled as "Impressionist", seems to have tried his best to deny that he is Impressionist all his life. From this point of view, Degas seems to want to maintain his independent thinking and creative space as a good creator, and does not want to follow the crowd.

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At the time of the impressionist exhibition, he was over forty years old. Seeing the anti-academic movement of young people such as Monet and Renoir, he can be peaceful and not extreme. On the one hand, encourage, identify with and participate in young people's art nouveau movement; On the other hand, he is not blindly attached to sports. He is well aware of the excellent techniques and aesthetic quality of traditional college art.

He seems to be out of place with the impression of the "declaration"

1. Impressionism declared "Exterior Light Painting School", saying that when walking, you should go outdoors and capture natural light. However, Fred pays more attention to the light in the theater. The works of theater dance account for more than half of degas's life works, which is enough to make him refuse to be labeled as impressionist.

2. Impressionists disapprove of using black. However, Degas works use a lot of black, and he thinks that the black level is very rich and the interaction with light is very chaotic. This is simply the basic aesthetic value difference from impressionism. For example, degas's self-portrait at the age of 2 1 is based on black and dark brown, and gradually piles up brightness. He used a lot of black in his self-portraits and family portraits.

3. Impressionists should look at the glitz of appearance, but Degas should keep looking inward. Impressionist paintings are bright and pleasant, with high brightness and color, and will always be light and pleasant. Degas is often heavy, classical and solemn, and his aesthetics is the opposite of impressionism. His works reveal loneliness, which is not only superficial prosperity, but also inner spiritual desolation.

Throughout his life, Degas maintained a sober, independent thinking and innovative attitude, and did not completely deny the tradition. Staring at the prosperity, crossing it is extremely lonely.

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1. Ballet Series

This is the most popular theme in the Degas series, which records the various poses and performance scenes of the performers. Among the impressionist painters, there are many painters who express the performing arts of the opera house. However, most of them are for the audience, middle-class owners, gentlemen or ladies, while Degas cares about the performers on the stage. The series of dancers is varied.

Degas's Ballet always focuses on dancers, even in orchestras and orchestras, he does not show it to the audience.

He has the opportunity to make friends with musicians, so that he can get close to the opera house and watch the performance. Like a serious researcher, he not only watched the dancers' performances on the stage, but also began to enter the dance school, take classes with the dancers, and sketch the body classes they did day after day on the dancers' rehearsal ground every day.

The Metropolitan Museum of New York has a dance classroom, which was founded in 1870. Paris Orsay Art Museum also has a dance classroom, which was created in 1876. Harvard University Work 1878, Yale University Work 189 1. It can be seen that his lessons in this field left behind all aspects of ballet training in that era.

2. Horse racing series

Degas paints horse races just as he paints ballet. Many painters painted people who went to the horse races, but Degas painted mainly knights and horses. At the same time, if you pay more attention to his works, you will find that he seldom paints pure scenery, and he pays more attention to people and scenes.

In traditional historical paintings, knights are always heroes, which is where Degas first became interested in horses. He did not think independently about the significance of horses in modern society when doing horse sketch exercises.

Later, I gradually came into contact with middle-class horse racing, which was a show-off activity at that time, dressed in fashion, exchanging pleasantries, socializing, gambling and a game.

Degas was born in a noble financial family and is no stranger to middle-class games.

Various compositions, such as before the race, before the race, before the race around the flag, are not only painting skills, but also aesthetic ideology that deserves your attention.

He used the newly invented photography technology to capture the dynamics of horses in a grid-by-grid way. Unlike some painters, he doesn't think photography is a threat to painting, nor does he just copy it with photography. Degas' ability to think independently is once again demonstrated. He tried to discover new visual elements to open up new painting space.

3. Fashion series

Degas has always been single and absorbed in creation. The extra worldly enthusiasm seems to have nothing to do with him.

It seems that he doesn't even want praise. He wants to be completely lonely.

Mary Kasha is the most famous female painter in the impressionist era. She met Degas and fell in love. Once they break up, they will return to their own creation, or they will be completely undisturbed and completely independent.

Both of them come from conservative and strict traditional families. Both of them seem to have aristocratic cleanliness in the world of love. Their characters are mature and introverted, and they are not as romantic as the artists most people imagine.

Degas has a reasonable reason to go in and out of women's fashion places, because he is with Kasha. You can imagine a scene where Kasha is carefully selecting hats, flowers and ribbons, while Degas is quietly watching, perhaps not admiring, but observing.

Degas created absinthe, cafes, milliner's shops and his most important painting, The Unfinished Portrait of Kasha. Why didn't it finish? The artist's mind is hard to guess.

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The mystery of degas's paintings is not only the unfinished portrait of his girlfriend. There is also a paper-cut Manet and Mrs Manet, which is now in the Kitakyushu Municipal Art Museum in Japan. A masterpiece "Young Sparta", which has not been completed in his life, is now in the National Gallery of London, England; Female nude series, painted in a completely private space, is bold, rude, vulgar, noble, unmarried and full of cleanliness. What made Degas draw these paintings?

Degas saw the prosperity of the city and the alienation between people behind it.

The alienation of modern people in western civilization was first manifested in painting. Alienation is a symbol of urban prosperity. Strangers are close, but they are indifferent to each other. The crowd is crowded, but people are particularly lonely in the noise.

Jiang Xun said that Degas are actually more modern and closer to many schools of modern painting art in the early 20th century.

Degas doesn't want to be labeled. If necessary, he would rather choose a more down-to-earth "realism".

The end—

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