The Everso-slightly Erotic Prints of Edgar Degas

Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas (1834 –1917) is recognized as a member of the French Impressionist movement. He was known for his strong drawing skills and often chose scenes involving action and movement, yet Degas’ portraits are also known for their psychological isolation. As a printmaker, Degas explored a world of image-making which continues to inspire us with his fluid line, odd compositions influenced by Japanese prints, and eerily isolated characters whom live in their own world unaware that we are watching them.

Born into a wealthy Parisian family, Degas was the oldest of five children. His mother was a Creole from New Orleans(who died when Degas was thirteen years old), and his father was a banker.

Degas, enrolled in the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, and graduated in 1853, with a baccalauréat in literature. He went to work in the Louvre Museum, but later enrolled at the Faculty of Law of the University of Paris, in November 1853. He quit his law studies two years later, when he met Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, and then went to study art at the École des Beaux-Arts.

In July 1856, he traveled to Italy, where he the works of several Italian Renaissance masters. He returned to France in 1859, and started his studio, painting mostly historical subjects. He exhibited at the Salon for the first time in 1865, and exhibited annually in the Salon during the next five years, shifting more and more toward contemporary subject matter. The change in his art was due to an influence by Édouard Manet, whom Degas had met in 1864. When the Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870, Degas enlisted in the National Guard, but eventually discovered that his eyesight was problematic, and suffered eye problems for the rest of his life.

After the war, in 1872, Degas spent a year in New Orleans, then returned to Paris. His father died in 1874, which forced Degas to sell his family’s home and their art collection to pay off his brother's debts. Dependent for the first time in his life to sell his artwork for income, he produced a lot of work during the next decade. In the mid-1870s he also made etchings, lithographs and monotypes. He was especially fascinated by the painterly qualities of the monotype process, but frequently embellished these printed images with chalk pastel. In fact, many of the pastels Degas produced actually started as monotypes.

The prints seen in this article are mainly singular images, but he explored etching as well. The linear qualities of those prints show his mastery of line and form. His explorations into tone and texture reveal a predilection for surface and luscious built up surfaces, as one would fine in his paintings. I enjoy the tonal qualities of these prints compared with his paintings because he shows that the medium isn’t a deterrent to understanding the environments of his characters. He goes deeply into the image, and presents us with a microcosm of a larger view, and more complex arena. He give us the best part of the total picture, much the same way an Asian painter would select the best part of a landscape to depict rather than fill up the composition with a lot of filler or unncessary information.

Degas joined a group of young artists, called the Impressionists in the mid 1870s. Between 1874 and 1886, the Impressionists mounted eight art shows, of which Degas took a leading role in their organization. He had little in common with some of the group’s members, whom he mocked for painting outdoors. Degas always worked indoors, preferring to work in his studio, either from memory, photographs, or live models. The figure remained his primary subject; his few landscapes were produced from memory or imagination. It was not unusual for him to repeat a subject many times, varying the composition. Degas said, "In art, nothing should look like chance, not even movement". As a conservative, he detested the scandal and publicity generated by the Impressionist’s shows. They eventually disbanded in 1886.

As Degas continued to work and sell his art, he began to amass a large art collection; collecting works by El Greco Manet, Pissarro, Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Ingres, Delacroix, Daumier and a number of Japanese prints.

Separately, Degas also developed a passion for photography, and he photographed his friends, dancers and nudes, which were used in some of his works.

Although famous for depicting horse races, Degas also chose to depict women at their work and ballet dancers in rehearsal, emphasizing their status as professionals doing a job. His interest in portraiture led Degas to study how a person's social stature or means of employment may be revealed. The prints Degas produced during this period are intimate, voyeuristic, and border at times on the erotic. Women at their toilet was a private, personal time, and Degas lets us inside the room with these women, lets us watch as they wash their hair, and quietly go about their business. Likewise the women dancing in rehearsals between dancing segments are seen fussing over their costumes, and wrapping their slippers in a similar personally attentive fashion. We are like one of the props men peeing at these beauties from behind a curtain or a keyhole. The isolation or separateness from the subject is felt intensely, intensified by dark, shadowy spaces.

Personally, Degas was known for his wit, which could be cruel. He once fired a model upon learning she was Protestant. Degas became an anti-Semite by the mid-1890s, and he broke off all relations with his Jewish friends and artists. He even refused to use models who he believed might be Jewish. As he got older, Degas blamed his inability to finish works based upon his poor eyesight. He ceased working in 1912, as his eyesight was nearly gone. He never married, and spent the last years of his life walking the streets of Paris before dying in 1917.

Degas never formally taught art, but he is credited with influencing several artists, including Mary Cassatt, Pablo Picasso and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

Degas's works are a part of numerous museum collections, and have been exhibited worldwide. His prints have garnered widespread attention, and serve as classic examples of an artist who loved the female figure, and who chose to present them in their most fragile, intimate moments, with grace and sensuality.

The Most Expensive Prints in the World...Really?

Well , my fellow inksters, some scouting around for examples of the top selling original prints at auction generated some varying reports, but I think I have grasped recent information to impart. You will pardon me for not knowing the very latest information, because I don't usually hang at the local art auction house. Being an artist myself, I'm likely to spend my cash on supplies than another work of art, and besides, it seems these auction things take place quite a lot so the information is always changing. :)

My quest to find the most expensive print in the world, lead me first to Pablo Picasso’s “Le Repas Frugal”, (pictured above) which was a bit of a surprise. I mean, really, this one is nice and all, but I guess I supposed that something by Rembrandt or Durer would claim the top prize. Still, there is something in this piece by Picasso that grabs the viewer. The primordial couple sitting very intimately at a table, looking out at the world, as if they hadn’t a care. The fact this piece comes early in Picasso’s oeuvre, lends some intrigue for the period the work is associated with – namely the carnival and Rose period. The couple’s faces are drawn and their gaze seems detached from the world around them. Their bodies are elongated as one would expect to see if El Greco was alive and working in the 20thc., but they aren’t representing celestial beings, just the average Parisian starving artist.

Then, after more investigation, I discovered there are subcategories to the original print auction records, and low and behold, some other surprising names and pieces popped up. I will give a listing and a sampling of them at the end of this article. More predictably, Rembrandt’s Three Crosses,” a 1653 etching, One impression,( about 80 are known to exist), sold privately a few years ago for $1.5 million. (It's estimable value in 1967 was a mere $20k. Yikes!) Albrecht Durer figures into the same subcategory with his famous "Adam and Eve" print.

Still, moving closer to our own time period, some of the most recent art auction sales for original prints on paper are garnishing staggering sums at auction. Pablo Picasso's “La Femme Qui Pleure I” (pictured here)now claims to the top price paid for a work of art on paper in the print category. A nice little piece, considering the subject is of a wailing woman:)

One Norwegian artist's print has recently risen to the upper levels of the charts and stolen our collective hearts. It's a quiet little color print by the tortured soul Edvard Munch. His "Young Woman on the Beach", done in 1891-92, just sold for a whopping $3.2 million.

Picasso's rival, Henri Matisse, rates the number Two spot for the Impressionist/Modern category with his “Océanie, La Mer”(below). It grandly reflects his latter Joy collage work, without the usual bold colors.

Two artists from the Contemporary category who have done well, one expectantly so, is Andy Warhol. His iconic Marilyn Monroe portrait is on the top-selling list, but it's his Chairman 'Mao" 10 portraits series that has garnished over $2 million in recent sales. They seemed a sort of quirky subject, given Mao wasn't the Iconic American figure like Marilyn was, but in the 1970s, when US President Nixon went to visit the famed leader of the eastern world, it was big news and a significant step toward what became global enterprise.

For a living artist, Jasper Johns has realized a hefty price for one of his prints, "Untitled" from 1983, where this painterly impression brought in $1.5 million in 2012.It's not exactly a favorite of mine, but it easily speaks to John's paintings.

All this fuss about some dried ink on paper, but admit it, they Are treasures in the art world, and they reflect a growing art-savvy collector base. We printmakers can take encouragement from this news, as we all know we’re not giving up the 'ink in our veins idea' that original prints are worth as much as any old bit of oil paint on canvas, or a collage, or even a .... photograph.

Truly, the real thing here to pay attention to is not how Much $ these lovely pieces of paper are Worth. The real importance to any of them is the artist who decided to make an image friom his/her imaginaiton or observations. The real importance is the result we get from seeing these images and the messages they convey to our collective souls. No one auction record could ever mean anything compared to that.

Look over these stats, and chew on those numbers. Just imagine how much paper, plates and ink we could buy with that, eh?

OLD MASTERS
1. Rembrandt van Rijn, “Christ crucified between the two thieves: The Three Crosses” (circa 1660) $990,000 at Doyle New York, May 23, 1990.
2. Rembrandt van Rijn, “Christ Presented to the People: Oblong Plate” (1655)
$956,100 at Christie’s London, December 10, 1991.
3. Rembrandt van Rijn, “Christ Crucified Between the Two Thieves: The Three Crosses” (1653–61) $924,200 at Christie’s London December 5, 2006.
4. Albrecht Durer, “Adam and Eve” (1504) $655,900 at Christie’s London, July 7, 2011.
5. Albrecht Durer, “Map of the Northern Sky and Map of the Southern Sky” (circa 1515)
$577,800

IMPRESSIONIST/MODERN
1. Pablo Picasso, “La Femme Qui Pleure I” (1937) $5,122,500 at Christie’s New York, November 1, 2011.
2. Henri Matisse, “Océanie, La Mer” (1946–47) $4,774,500 at Christie’s London, June 21, 2011.
3. Pablo Picasso, “Le Repas Frugal” (1904) $3,052,400 at Christie’s London, June 20, 2012.
4. Edvard Munch, “Vampire II” (1895–1902)$2,182,800 at Grev Wedels Plass Auksjoner, Oslo, November 27, 2007.
5. Pablo Picasso, “La Minotauromachie” (1935) $1,980,400

CONTEMPORARY
1. Andy Warhol, “Mao” (set of 10 from 1972) $2,544,800 at Sotheby’s London, May 22, 2012.
2. Andy Warhol, “Mao” (set of 10 from 1972) $1,684,900 at Christie’s London, October 16, 2007.
3. Andy Warhol, “Marilyn Monroe” (set of 10 from 1967) $1,551,800 at Christie’s London, June 20, 2007.
4. Jasper Johns, “Untitled” (1983) $1,482,500 at Christie’s, New York, May 9, 2012.
5. Andy Warhol, “Mao” (set of 10 from 1972) $938,500.

Printmaking's Day-Dreamer - Marc Chagall

Marc Zaharovich Chagall , 1887-1985, (whose given name was  Moishe Shagal), was born in Liozna, near the largely Jewish city of Vitebsk  in Belarus, (then part of the Russian Empire) . He lived a good portion of his life in France and has been considered one of the most successful artists of the 20th century. He worked in painting, stained glass, tapestries and fine art prints. 

Marc Chagall spent an enormous amount of time making prints and they are highly sought in the markets. Their wistfulness and sweetness is like candy to a child, but they do describe a magical existence where people can often daydream.  He was not concerned about people’s perceptions of his work. He made images that were personally up-lifting, and the pure saturation of his colors crank up the volume on emotion. I, for one, do not care for his continued use of unmodified colors, or a lot of his child-like rendering of figures, but I can appreciate his effort to bring a sense of wonder about the world to each of his works. In doing this article I selected images that I felt had something ‘fresh’ about them. Honestly, his more starkly black and white prints are quite appealing. A lot of Chagall’s work reflects his contacts and exposure to the Parisian artistic hub working before and during the world wars. There are clear references to Picasso and Leger, while some works relate more clearly with his work in stained glass. In any case, I hope you will enjoy this assortment for your holiday viewing pleasure.

Biography

Chagall was the eldest of nine children. His family’s name, Shagal is a variation of the name Segal, which is a Levitic group within a Jewish community. His was a deeply religious Hasidic family and he credited the Hasidic culture with having a major impact upon his work. He developed a style that dealt with Jewish folk culture and his childhood memories of life in Vitebsk. Throughout his career "he remained true to his Jewish roots.”

As a child, Chagall studied Hebrew and the Bible at the local Jewish religious school. When he saw a fellow student drawing one day, he claimed it was a revelation and he told his mother that he would become an artist. 

Chagall moved to St. Petersburg in 1906  to study art.  He studied under  Léon Bakst at the Zvantseva School of Drawing and Painting and he stayed in St. Petersburg until 1910.  Then he moved to Paris to develop his artistic style,  enrolling at the  La Palette art academy.  His sensibility for color was pure,  unabashed and he was soon recognized by poets, writers and artists like Guillaume Apollinaire, Robert Delaunay and Fernand Léger. In Paris, he became aware of the latest art movements Cubism, Fauvism and eventually Surrealism, but the subject of his work in Paris remained his homeland. He painted Jewish subjects from his memories of Vitebsk, and "… they were  his dreams". Although some of his imagery influenced other surrealist artists,  Chagall did not want his work to be associated with any movement.  He considered his work unique and the symbols associated with it deeply personal.

His goal during this period was to become a successful artist to provide for his family, and as opportunity would have it, he became the Commissar of Arts for Vitebsk, establishing a distinguished art school in the Soviet Union. In 1915, Chagall began exhibiting his work in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Famine had spread after the war ended in 1918 and Chagall found work as an art teacher to war orphans. After struggling for two years, he moved back to France to develop his art. 

In 1923, Chagall left Moscow to return to France. He formed a business partnership with French art dealer Ambroise Vollard. It was then he began to make etchings and other prints for a series of illustrated books, including Gogol's Dead Souls, the Bible, and the Fables of La Fontaine. During this period he also traveled throughout France,  Holland, Spain, Italy, Egypt, Palestine. Chagall felt at home in Palestine amongst the Yiddish and Russian population. He later told a friend that Palestine gave him "the most vivid impression he had ever received", and as a result, he immersed himself in "the history of the Jews”.

When Hitler gained power in Germany, anti-Semitism laws were being introduced and Dachau had been established. The Nazis had begun their campaign against anything abstract, expressionist or surreal, intellectual, Jewish, foreign, socialist-inspired, or difficult to understand.  The new German authorities made a mockery of Chagall's art, and he and his work was pronounced degenerate.  It had a profound effect upon the artist.

After Germany invaded and occupied France, Chagall had been so involved with his art, that it was not until 1940 that he began to understand the Vichy government began approving anti-Semitic laws and that Jews were being systematically removed from public and academic positions. Many Russian and Jewish artists sought escape to the United States,  including Chaim Soutine, Max Ernst, Max Beckmann,  author Victor Serge and prize-winning author Vladimir Nabokov. It was  Alfred Barr of the New York Museum of Modern Art and Chagall’s daughter Ida, who helped Chagall and his wife come to the United States in 1941. Chagall was one of over 2,000 who were rescued by Varian Fry, the American journalist, and Hiram Bingham IV, the American Vice-Consul in Marseilles, who ran a rescue operation to smuggle artists and intellectuals out of Europe to the US by providing them with forged visas. 

Once in the US, Chagall befriended other European artists like Piet Mondrian and André Breton, but he found himself out of favor with American tastes regarding contemporary art. Americans“had little in common with a folkloristic storyteller of Russo-Jewish extraction with a propensity for mysticism." Those attitudes changed in 1941 when  Henri Matisse’s son Pierre became his representative and manager. He caught the attention of critics and collectors throughout Europe, and for the rest of his life enjoyed enormous, prolific success. 

Chagall's colors attracted and captured the viewer's attention. During his earlier period his work was limited by an emphasis on form but his colors were a living part of the picture and suggested movement and rhythm.  Lovers, musicians and acrobats were often a part of his subject matter.  They represented, "a sort of grace, delicacy, precariousness, and a fragility of love and life.

Chagall once said of his work 'I don't understand them at all. They are not literature. They are only pictorial arrangements of images that obsess me...”I painted pictures upside down, decapitated people and dissected them, scattering the pieces in the air, all in the name of another perspective, another kind of picture composition and another formalism”.

In 1960, Chagall began creating stained glass windows,  which I will admit feel the most truly spontaneous creations of his long career. They are pure joy and he enjoyed seeing natural light pass through their many-colored panes. The ephemeral experience of seeing people stop in jaw-gaping awe at the windows at the Art Institute of Chicago was always an amazing sight. They transcended the everyman’s artistic experience and brought beauty to their existence.

On a personal note, Chagall married his first love Bella. A year later, they had a daughter, Ida. In 1944, Bella died and Chagall didn’t make any art for many months. He later was associated with Virginia Haggard, great-niece of the author Henry Rider Haggard. They had a son, David McNeil.  In the 1950s, he was introduced to Valentina (Vava) Brodsky, a woman from a similar Russian Jewish background and they remained companions for many years. The gravestone of Marc Chagall and his wife can be found in Saint Paul de Vence, France.

The famed 20thc. art critic Robert Hughes said Chagall w as "the quintessential Jewish artist of the twentieth century".  Pablo Picasso even once rdeclared that "Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is". Although he was personally caught up in the horrors of European history between 1914 and 1945: world wars, revolution, ethnic persecution, the murder and exile of millions, he chose to put his experiences into images to which everyone could immediately respond. He was also referred to as a "poet, dreamer, and exotic apparition."

From his vivid imagination and memories Chagall was able to use scenes of peasant life, and intimate views of a Jewish village. There was much to support a child-like view of innocence and love of the world which Chagall never really lost, but the realities of his long life saw tragedy and loss like everyone else’s. What is amazing about his work is that it retains an outward ‘joie de vivre’ into the 21^st century, and that it will most likely endure throughout the ages. 

Exhibitions:

1939, Carnegie Prize, Pittsburgh, PA

1960, Brandeis University, honorary degree in Laws, at its 9th Commencement

1967, "Message Biblique", the Louvre,  Paris, France

1969, Musée National Message Biblique Marc Chagall. 

1969 to 1970, "Hommage a Marc Chagall",  the Grand Palais,  Paris, France

1973, The Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow, Russia

1977, the city of JerusalemYakir Yerushalayim (Worthy Citizen of Jerusalem) award.

1982,  Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden

1985, the Royal Academy in London , England

2003, the Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris,  a major retrospective in conjunction with the Musée National Message Biblique Marc Chagall, Nice, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Public collections:

Art Institute of Chicago, IL

Biblical Message Museum,  Nice, France

Church of St. Stephan,  Mainz, Germany

Fraumünster abbey,Zurich, Switzerland

Hadassah Hospital Ein Kerem , Jerusalem, Israel

Lincoln Center, New York, NY

Marc Chagall Museum,Vitebsk, Belarus. It was the family home on Pokrovskaya Street.

The Marc Chagall Yufuin Kinrin-ko Museum , Yufuin, Kyushu, Japan

Metropolitan Opera, NY

Metz Cathedral,Notre-Dame de Reims, France

Museum of Biblical Art in Dallas, Texas

'Palais Garnier' (the Opera de Paris), France

The only church in the world with a complete set of Chagall window-glass is in Tudeley,  Kent, England

Union Church of Pocantico Hills. Commissioned by John D. Rockefeller, Jr.

United Nations Headquarters, NY