| Irish bookmaker Paddy Power was fending off the wrath of Christians in overwhelmingly Roman Catholic Ireland on Friday over an advert depicting Jesus and the Apostles gambling at the Last Supper. The billboard posters, on display in the Irish capital, adapt Leonardo da Vinci's famous painting of the event to show Jesus with a stack of poker chips, Judas with 30 pieces of silver and other apostles clutching hands of cards. "There's a place for fun and games," says the caption.
Paintings in history and Edgar Degas art:
Pastel technology allowed Degas to clearly display his talent as a painter and his love towards expressive lines. At the same time, rich colors and "flashing" strokes of pastel helped the artist to create a special paint environment, the same shimmering airiness, which distinguishes his work. Looking into Degas pastels, with particular clarity, we realize the essence of new achievements of art. Here, color appears before your eyes from an iridescent radiance, from a streaming flow of rainbow "elementary particles", from a crossed vortex of "power" lines. Here, everything is full of meaningful movement. Running lines produces the shape and color originates from the vortex of colorful strokes. This is particularly noticeable in "Blue Dancers" from the Moscow Museum, where as if the dance melody appears from the iridescent flicker of pure tones. Among the ten works by Edgar Degas, archived in Russian museums, only one ("Dancer at the photographer's" from The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow), was painted with oil paints. Other paintings are made by using pastels.
Throughout his life, Degas created a large number of preparatory sketches and completed works. His graphic works can serve as evidence of artistic growth, which was felt by the artist and they demonstrate how the master prepared pastel compositions, depicting dance scenes from separate sketches, movements and postures. In these works, the coloristic approach of the artist is fearless than in his paintings. In them, he freely and sharply used colors.
The sculpture of Degas:
In the end of the 1860s, Degas started making small wax sculptures and since his eyesight deteriorated, the artist paid more and more attention to this genre. Degas repeated the painting subjects in sculptures - dancers, bathers or jumping jockeys.
These works by Degas are sculpted for himself, they replaced his sketches and few sculptures he finished completely. With time, Degas increasingly turned to sculpture, because he could rely more on touch than on his nearly lost sight.
Degas did not do much with metals and stones; he made sculptures only from soft materials exclusively for himself. In paintings with ballerina dancers, bathers and horses (often modelling), Degas sought the plastically expressive transmission of instant motion, the severity and suddenness of posture, while maintaining the integrity and constructiveness of the plastic figures.
Supported by Bartolome, a friend and sculptor, Degas created a lot of wax and clay figures of dancers and horses. Degas valued wax for its variability and friends who visited the artist's studio, sometimes found a wax ball instead of sculptures: apparently, Degas found his creation to be unsuccessful. None of these sculptures, with the exception of "Little Dancer of Fourteen Years", Degas never exhibited. After the death of Degas, around 70 works were found in his studio and the artist's heirs turned them into bronze figures - Degas never worked with bronze. The first samples of these sculptures appeared in 1921. For many years, it was believed that the wax sculptures, which were made from moulds, could not survive, but they were discovered in a basement in 1954; as it turned out, specially made duplicates were used for the moulds. The following year, all the wax sculptures of Degas were bought by an American collector Paul Mellon, who, after giving a small portion of the works to the Louvre, still owned many of them. Approximately 20 - 25 moulds were made from each wax sculpture in such a way that the total number of copies was around 1500. Some of them can be seen in major museums around the world, and in some places, for instance, a complete set is available in Glypotek Ny Carlsberg, Copenhagen.
Drawings by Degas:
Drawing had been the cornerstone of creativity of Degas. The artist worked in the tradition of Ingress, one of the greatest painters in European art history. Degas was helped by a phenomenal visual memory and an innate sense of the plastic of a line and contours. He was born for the picture.
In his early drawings, Degas sought stunning accuracy and naturalism, often using pencil. However, in the 1870s, the artist's style became more relaxed and smooth, at this time Degas almost completely abandoned the pencil and moved to white chalk and black carbon. The stunning effect which he achieved using this technique, perfectly illustrates the undated, "Sketch of two riders". Degas used a different technique of drawing also and quite often combined different materials within a single work. Most of the drawings of Degas are sketches and drawings of human figures, such as "Ballerina tying her shoe" of 1880 - 1885. This figure is made not so much with a pencil, as much with charcoal. Usually, the artist did a series of preliminary sketches, and sometimes used the same sketch for several different paintings. |
