Degas, Edgar (Edgar Degas; Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas)

Boredom soon overcomes me when I am contemplating nature.
-- Edgar Degas

J'ai vraiment, un vrai bagage dans la tête. S'il y avait pour cela, comme il y a partout ici, des compagnies d'assurance, voilà un ballot je ferais assurer de suite.

[I really have some luggage in my head. If only there were insurance companies for that as there are for so many things here, there's a bale I should insure at once.]
-- Edgar Degas

Your pictures would have been finished a long time ago if I were not forced every day to do something to earn money.

-- Edgar Degas

I assure you no art was ever less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and study of the great masters; of inspiration, spontaneity, temperament — temperament is the word — I know nothing.
-- Edgar Degas

À vous il faut la vie naturelle, à moi la vie factice.

[You need the natural life; I, the artificial.]
-- Edgar Degas

Hitherto the nude has always been represented in poses which presuppose an audience; but these women of mine are honest, simple folk, unconcerned by any other interests than those involved in their physical condition. Here is another; she is washing her feet. It is as if you looked through a key-hole.
-- Edgar Degas

What a delightful thing is the conversation of specialists! One understands absolutely nothing and it’s charming.

-- Edgar Degas

Comme nous avons mal fait de nous laisser appeler Impressionistes.

[What a pity we allowed ourselves to be called Impressionists.]
-- Edgar Degas

I always urged my contemporaries to look for interest and inspiration to the development and study of drawing, but they would not listen. They thought the road to salvation lay by the way of colour.
-- Edgar Degas

A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, and some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people.
-- Edgar Degas

It seems to me that today, if the artist wishes to be serious — to cut out a little original niche for himself, or at least preserve his own innocence of personality — he must once more sink himself in solitude. There is too much talk and gossip; pictures are apparently made, like stock-market prices, by competition of people eager for profit; in order to do anything at all we need (so to speak) the wit and ideas of our neighbors as much as the businessmen need the funds of others to win on the market. All this traffic sharpens our intelligence and falsifies our judgment.

-- Edgar Degas

Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things.

-- Edgar Degas

There is a kind of success that is indistinguishable from panic.
-- Edgar Degas

Une peinture, c'est d'abord un produit de l'imagination de l'artiste, ce ne doir jamais être une copie. Si, ensuite, on peut y ajouter deux ou trois accents de nature, evidemment ca ne fait pas de mal.

[A painting is above all a product of the artist's imagination, it must never be a copy. If, at a later stage, he wants to add two or three touches from nature, of course it doesn't spoil anything.]
-- Edgar Degas

C'est très bien de copier ce qu'on voit, c'est beaucoup mieux de dessiner ce que l'on ne voit plus que dans son mémoire. C'est une transformation pendant laquelle l'ingéniosité collabore avec la mémoire. Vous ne reproduisez que ce qui vous a frappé, c'est-à-dire le nécessaire.

-- Edgar Degas

Je voudrais être illustre et inconnu.

[I should like to be famous and unknown.]

-- Edgar Degas

I have been, or seemed, hard with everyone because I was carried away by a sort of brutality born of my distrust in myself and my ill-humor. I have felt so badly equipped, so soft, in spite of the fact that my attitude towards art seemed to me so just. I was disgusted with everyone, and especially myself.

-- Edgar Degas

Visitor: Monsieur Degas, were there any of Monet's pictures at the Durand-Ruel exhibition?
Degas: Why, I met Monet himself there, and I said to him, "Let me get out of here. Those reflections in the water hurt my eyes!" His pictures were always too draughty for me. If it had been any worse I should have had to turn up my coat collar.

-- Edgar Degas

But it's true, isn't it Pauline, that people imagine that the artists and their models spend their time getting up to all sorts of obscenities? As far as work goes, well, they paint or sculpt when they are tired of enjoying themselves.
-- Edgar Degas

Conversation in real life is full of half-finished sentences and overlapping talk. Why shouldn't painting be too?
-- Edgar Degas

Damn, and just when I was starting to get it!
-- Edgar Degas

Drawing is the artist's most direct and spontaneous expression, a species of writing: it reveals, better than does painting, his true personality.
-- Edgar Degas

Great patience is called for on the hard path that I have entered on.
-- Edgar Degas

How awful it is not being able to see clearly any more! I have had to give up drawing and painting and for years now content myself with sculpture ... But if my eyesight continues to dim I won't even be able to model any more. What will I do with my days then?
-- Edgar Degas

I feel as a horse must feel when the beautiful cup is given to the jockey.
-- Edgar Degas

I frequently lock myself in my studio. I do not often see the people I love, and in the end I shall suffer for it... painting is one's private life.
-- Edgar Degas

If painting weren't so difficult, it wouldn't be fun.
-- Edgar Degas

The moods of sadness that come over anyone who takes up art... these dismal moods have very little compensation.
-- Edgar Degas

The secret is to follow the advice the masters give you in their works while doing something different from them.
-- Edgar Degas

Truth is never ugly when one can find in it what one needs.
-- Edgar Degas

What is certain is that setting a piece of nature in place and drawing it are two very different things.
-- Edgar Degas

What use is my mind? Granted that it enables me to hail a bus and to pay my fare. But once I am inside my studio, what use is my mind? I have my model, my pencil, my paints. My mind doesn't interest me.
-- Edgar Degas

The air you breathe in a picture is not necessarily the same as the air out of doors.

-- Edgar Degas

If I were the government I would have a special brigade of gendarmes to keep an eye on artists who paint landscapes from nature. Oh, I don't mean to kill anyone; just a little dose of bird-shot now and then as a warning.
-- Edgar Degas

I, marry? Oh, I could never bring myself to do it. I would have been in mortal misery all my life for fear my wife might say, "That's a pretty little thing," after I had finished a picture.
-- Edgar Degas

I'm glad to say I haven't found my style yet. I'd be bored to death.
-- Edgar Degas

People call me the painter of dancing girls. It has never occurred to them that my chief interest in dancers lies in rendering movement and painting pretty clothes.
-- Edgar Degas

The museums are here to teach the history of art and something more as well, for, if they stimulate in the weak a desire to imitate, they furnish the strong with the means of their emancipation.
-- Edgar Degas

A picture is a thing which requires as much knavery, as much malice, and as much vice as the perpetration of a crime. Make it untrue and add an accent of truth.
-- Edgar Degas

Art is vice. One does not wed it, one rapes it.
-- Edgar Degas

Even working from nature you have to compose.
-- Edgar Degas

Drawing is not what you see but what you must make others see.
-- Edgar Degas

Make a drawing. Start it all over again, trace it. Start it and trace it again.
-- Edgar Degas

You must do over the same subject ten times, a hundred times. In art nothing must appear accidental, even a movement.
-- Edgar Degas

Make people's portraits in familiar and typical attitudes.
-- Edgar Degas

Work a great deal at evening effects, lamplight, candlelight, etc. The intriguing thing is not to show the source of the light but the effect of the lighting.
-- Edgar Degas

Be sure to give the same expression to a person's face that you give to his body.
-- Edgar Degas

Painting is not very difficult when you don't know how; but when you know, oh! then, it's another matter.
-- Edgar Degas

It requires courage to make a frontal attack on nature through the broad planes and the large lines and it is cowardly to do it by the facets and details. It is a battle.
-- Edgar Degas

Everybody has talent at twenty-five. The difficult thing is to have it at fifty.
-- Edgar Degas

Technorati Tags: Quotations Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas Edgar Degas quote quotation