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Essay / One The Founders of Impressionism: Edgar Degas
Edgar Degas was a French artist considered one of the founders of Impressionism, although he called himself a realist. Degas began his artistic career as a historical painter, with an academic background and studies of classical art, but in his thirties he decided to change his style. He combined the traditional methods he learned with a more contemporary subject. He was said to be a classic painter of modern life. Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement founded due to opposition and harsh criticism from the conventional art community in France. Impressionist artworks are characterized by open composition, realistic depiction of light, small but visible brushstrokes, and movements and elements of human experience. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay The Impressionists went against the conventions of artistic society to depict real life, not mythology. Degas was an impressionist and encompassed all of these characteristics in this work. In his oil painting, Place de la Concorde 1875, he recognizes the traditions and conventions of classical art, but adapts to them. The painting represents Ludovic Napoléon Lepic smoking a cigar and his daughters walking their dog. The family is depicted with dull, blank faces and does not appear to interact with each other. The positioning of the family is odd as they all face each other, move and look in all different directions, this composition gives off a feeling of isolation. Degas explores this isolation further with the amount of negative space painted, with the large empty square in the background and only four figures in the foreground. Degas is known for depicting human isolation in his paintings through figures and composition, but this is primarily seen in his portraits. Degas was an enthusiast of photography in his later years, his passion for photography strongly influenced his painting Place de la Concorde. The whole picture seems to have been cropped. The man in the left corner has been cut in half, and Lepic, his daughters, and his dog have all been cut so that the lower half of their bodies are not visible, along with the severed building and carriage. disabled. In traditional classical paintings this would not be the case, everything would be shown as a whole, or not at all. There has always been a long tradition of the female nude, represented as modest and sensual. This tradition dates back to the ancient Greeks and Romans in sculptures such as the goddess Venus modestly covering her body after a bath. Dr. Steven Tucker, a spokesperson for Khan Academy, says women have always been portrayed as being "dressed by mythology or dressed by pure beauty." Édouard Manet's Olympia is inspired by Titian's Venus of Urbino, but it removes the conventional approach to the representation of space and body positioning, and it also removes the mask of mythology behind the Venus and women represented only as That of Venus. Édouard Manet's Olympia draws on this convention but also does something radical and modern for the Classical and Renaissance periods. The woman depicted, Olympia, is not depicted as a Venus or a goddess but as a real woman in a real Parisian apartment, he stripped away the facade of women being perfect mythical humans. Olympia is not painted to be perfect, her face is asymmetrical and her lips are too thin. Manet painted a.