"One must do the same subject over again ten times, a hundred times. In art nothing must resemble an accident, not even movement"
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Degas is selling a paradox: art that looks alive should be built like machinery. The line reads like a rebuke to the romantic myth of the inspired scribble, that holy accident we’re supposed to admire because it feels authentic. For Degas, authenticity isn’t spontaneity; it’s control so complete you can simulate spontaneity without leaving fingerprints. “Ten times, a hundred times” isn’t just work ethic rhetoric. It’s an aesthetic principle: repetition is how you scrub away the arbitrary and keep only the inevitable.
The kicker is the last clause: “not even movement.” Degas is the painter of dancers, racehorses, bodies caught mid-shift. Movement is the very thing that seems to demand looseness, the sketch-like flourish. He insists on the opposite. The swirl of a tutu, the off-balance foot, the cropped, candid angle - all the stuff that makes his work feel like a stolen glance - is engineered. The subtext is slightly defensive, too: a warning not to confuse his modern-looking compositions with improvisation. Those radical framings, indebted to photography and Japanese prints, are choices, not accidents.
Context matters: late 19th-century Paris is obsessed with speed, spectacle, and new technologies that “capture” reality instantly. Degas counters that the instant is a construction. He’s not freezing life; he’s choreographing it, then pretending he didn’t. That’s the quiet audacity: making labor disappear so completely it reads as grace.
The kicker is the last clause: “not even movement.” Degas is the painter of dancers, racehorses, bodies caught mid-shift. Movement is the very thing that seems to demand looseness, the sketch-like flourish. He insists on the opposite. The swirl of a tutu, the off-balance foot, the cropped, candid angle - all the stuff that makes his work feel like a stolen glance - is engineered. The subtext is slightly defensive, too: a warning not to confuse his modern-looking compositions with improvisation. Those radical framings, indebted to photography and Japanese prints, are choices, not accidents.
Context matters: late 19th-century Paris is obsessed with speed, spectacle, and new technologies that “capture” reality instantly. Degas counters that the instant is a construction. He’s not freezing life; he’s choreographing it, then pretending he didn’t. That’s the quiet audacity: making labor disappear so completely it reads as grace.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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