Edgar Degas
Jockeys on Horseback before Distant Hills, 1884
Oil on canvas
Detroit Institute of Arts
Works of paper by Degas, Renoir at DIA Detroit Many of the most popular impressionist-era artists are featured in the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) exhibition’ Ordinary People by Extraordinary Artists: Works on Paper by Degas, Renoir, and Friends’, on view September 19, 2014–March 29, 2015.]]>
Source: Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA)
“Ordinary People” is a “who’s who” of the most important artists of the late 19th century and the exhibition illustrates their impact on the course art would take moving into the modern era through a focus on their images of people.
Many of the DIA’s strongest holdings in works on paper are highlighted, including pastels, etchings and lithographs of Edgar Degas’ bathers, dancers and jockeys; Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s portraits of his family and celebrities; Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s stage performers; Paul Cézanne’s bathers; and Pierre Bonnard’s and Édouard Vuillard’s intimate interior and city life scenes. Among the other artists featured are Édouard Manet, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, Mary Cassatt and Camille Pissarro.
In 1870s Paris, these young, well-educated and under-appreciated artists radically broke with tradition. Instead of glorifying kings and princes they focused on everyday life and the people around them. Their sketchy style was too unfinished for traditionalists, and officials at the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris dismissed their unconventional ideas as laughable. For their first exhibition, they called themselves the Anonymous Society of Artists; some of the unknowns among them were Degas, Renoir and Cézanne.
While these artists were accomplished painters, printmaking was important to them because they wanted their art to be available to the general public. Prints were usually affordable, and multiple copies could be made, making art accessible to a broad audience, not just for the rich or on museum walls. The public could also enjoy prints through posters and magazines, made especially popular by Toulouse-Lautrec and Bonnard.
Related content
Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement (exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2011)
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