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Edgar Degas Quotes
1834–1917 France
Edgar Degas (19 July 1834 – 27 September 1917), was a French painter, print-maker and sculptor. He was moreover an active organizer of several Impressionist exhibitions, but never painted 'plain air' himself.
Also known as: Degas, Degas, Edgar
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What a delightful thing is the conversation of specialists! One understands absolutely nothing and it's charming.
Painting is not very difficult when you don't know how; but when you know, oh! then, it's another matter.
The Shop-Talk of Edgar Degas (1961)
Make a drawing. Start it all over again, trace it. Start it and trace it again.
The Shop-Talk of Edgar Degas (1961)
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.
The Shop-Talk of Edgar Degas (1961)
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.
Degas: An Intimate Portrait (1927)
It is very good to copy what one sees; it is much better to draw what you can't see any more but is in your memory. It is a transformation in which imagination and memory work together. You only reproduce what struck you, that is to say the necessary.
I always urged my contemporaries [the Impressionist painters in Paris, circa 1885] 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.
Make portraits of people in familiar and typical positions, above all give their faces the same choice of expression one gives their bodies. Thus if laughter is typical for a person, make him laugh – there are, naturally, feelings that one cannot render…
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.
I always suspect an artist who is successful before he is dead.
Misattributed
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