EDGAR DEGAS (1834-1917) "...Aspects of Degas's work - mainly, his ballet paintings from the 1880S - have long been popular with a broad audience; too much so for their own good. But he has never been a "popular" artist like the wholly inferior Auguste Renoir, whose Paris-Boston retrospective in 1985 beguiled the crowds and bored everyone else. Degas was much harder to take, with his spiny intelligence (never Renoir's problem), his puzzling mixtures of categories, his …showed first 75 words of 2099 total…

…showed last 75 words of 2099 total… And you cannot fail to associate this with Degas's own working methods, the sense of filiation and descent that would breathe through his work for the rest of his life, the past feeding into the present and then out into the future. Degas, the synthesizer of Ingres and Delacroix, would point - through the wild color-fields and direct manual touch of his later years - to a modernism that was not yet born."