Degas Quotes

I don't belong to any school. I work in my corner. I admire Degas.

What Degas called 'a way of seeing' must consequently bear a wide enough interpretation to include way of being, power, knowledge, and will.

When a figure painter executes a landscape he treats it as if it were a face; Degas' landscapes are unparalleled because they are visionary landscapes.

Degas is a master of creating compositions that don't look composed.

A nude by Degas is chaste. But his women wash in tubs!

Wine is a sensual pleasure. Its real value is when it splashes into the glass. It is not in the category of a Degas painting. The point is not for people to go to their cellar and stroke their bottles.

I really became convinced I wanted to tell the story of the real-life model for the Degas sculpture 'Little Dancer Aged 14,' which was unveiled in 1881, the Belle Epoque.

There is more similarity in the marketing challenge of selling a precious painting by Degas and a frosted mug of root beer than you ever thought possible.

The paintings that laughed at him merrily from the walls were like nothing he had ever seen or dreamed of. Gone were the flat, thin surfaces. Gone was the sentimental sobriety. Gone was the brown gravy in which Europe had been bathing its pictures for centuries. Here were pictures riotously mad with the sun. With light and air and throbbing vivacity. Paintings of ballet girls backstage, done in primitive reds, greens, and blues thrown next to each other irreverantly. He looked at the signature. Degas.

The first sight of Degas' pictures was the turning point of my artistic life.

Sometimes it made him [Degas] furious that he could not find a chink in my armor, and there would be months when we just could not see each other, and then something I painted would bring us together again.

Just as a classical dancer repeats the same movements again and again, in order to achieve a greater perfection of line and balance, so Degas repeats the same motifs - it was one of the things that gave him so much sympathy with dancers.

Only the bad artists of the nineteenth century were frightened by the invention of photography; the good ones all welcomed it and used it. Degas liked it not only because it provided an accurate record, but because the snapshot showed him a means of escape from the classical rules of design. Through it he learnt to make a composition without the use of formal symmetry.