Creativity Quote by Edgar Degas

Degas doesn’t flatter the artist as a sensitive spouse of beauty; he casts art as an illicit compulsion, seized rather than serenaded. The shock is the point. By calling art “vice,” he drags it out of the salon’s moral perfume and back into the body: appetite, obsession, the kind of craving that ruins your sleep and reorganizes your life. The second sentence lands like a slap because it rejects the popular myth of harmonious inspiration. “Marry it legitimately” is the bourgeois fantasy of art-making as tasteful vocation, safely socialized and publicly approved. Degas says that posture is a lie.

The subtext is about power and extraction. To make something compelling, he implies, you don’t negotiate with your subject; you take from it. That tracks with Degas’ own practice: relentless drafting, scraping, reworking, treating dancers, laundresses, and racehorses as problems to be solved through form. His realism wasn’t kindly reportage; it was a ruthless editorial eye, cutting life into composition.

Context matters: late-19th-century Paris was busy laundering modernity into spectacle - opera, ballet, department stores - while Impressionism was being domesticated into “pretty light.” Degas resists that domestication. The line also exposes the era’s gendered logic: art is feminized, the artist masculinized, desire translated into possession. It’s ugly, and deliberately so. Degas isn’t offering a moral blueprint; he’s confessing the violence he believes craftsmanship demands, daring you to admit how often great art is made by people who refuse to be polite.