Edgar Degas: Works from 'great pioneer' of modern art come to Melbourne
A major retrospective of one of the most influential artists of the 19th and 20th centuries, Edgar Degas, is set to open in Melbourne.
Degas: A New Vision was curated by the pre-eminent Degas scholar and biographer Henri Loyrette.
A former director of the Musee D'Orsay and the Louvre Museum, Mr Loyrette has been studying Degas for more than 40 years.
"Every time I work on him I discover something new. He is really an artist who enriched my life," he said.
"And working on Degas is not only working on Degas himself ... you cannot understand him if you don't study Manet, if you don't study all the Impressionist painters, but also if you don't listen to music.
"It was society in the second half of the 19th century that was so brilliant and so interesting."
Mr Loyrette said Degas was one of the most influential artists of the French Impressionist movement, though he had little in common with many of his contemporaries.
"He didn't like this word, you know, Impressionist, he wanted to be called a realist painter," he said.
"He had nothing in common with Monet for example [but] they understood they had to fight something, against the salon, against academism and so on.
"So it was more a common fight, than a common idea about paintings or art."
Degas's modern take 'radical' for the time
With 200 artworks from all over the world, the exhibition shows that as well as becoming a technically accomplished painter, Degas also mastered printmaking, sculpture, and draughtsmanship.
But National Gallery of Victoria director Tony Ellwood said it was Degas's choice and treatment of his subject matter that set him apart from his contemporaries and influenced the course of modern art.
"Degas was really a great pioneer around subject matter, he was looking a modern life in a way that was really radical for its time," Ellwood said.
And Degas's paintings of ballet dancers in Paris in the 1880s and 1890s exemplify what was a radical approach for the time.
"When we look at the ballet dancers, he is not just looking at the beauty of dance, he is looking at the working conditions, and the commitment that went in to what these young women particularly had to commit to at that time," he said.
It is the first major international retrospective of Degas's work in almost 30 years, and Mr Ellwood said the NGV was expecting more than 200,000 visitors.
"We've had 65 lenders from 40 different cities, it's logistically the most complex exhibition that we've ever embarked on at the NGV," he said.
The exhibition opens on Friday.