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Degas is a master of creating compositions that don't look composed. -- Max Liebermann
A nude by Degas is chaste. But his women wash in tubs!... -- Paul Gauguin
I don't belong to any school. I work in my corner. I admire Degas. -- Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
The first sight of Degas' pictures was the turning point of my artistic life. -- Mary Cassatt
What Degas called 'a way of seeing' must consequently bear a wide enough interpretation to include way of being, power, knowledge, and will. -- Paul Valery
When a figure painter executes a landscape he treats it as if it were a face; Degas' landscapes are unparalleled because they are visionary landscapes. -- Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
There is more similarity in the marketing challenge of selling a precious painting by Degas and a frosted mug of root beer than you ever thought possible. -- A. Alfred Taubman
I really became convinced I wanted to tell the story of the real-life model for the Degas sculpture 'Little Dancer Aged 14,' which was unveiled in 1881, the Belle Epoque. -- Cathy Marie Buchanan
Sometimes it made him [Degas] furious that he could not find a chink in my armor, and there would be months when we just could not see each other, and then something I painted would bring us together again. -- Mary Cassatt
Wine is a sensual pleasure. Its real value is when it splashes into the glass. It is not in the category of a Degas painting. The point is not for people to go to their cellar and stroke their bottles. -- Serena Sutcliffe
Just as a classical dancer repeats the same movements again and again, in order to achieve a greater perfection of line and balance, so Degas repeats the same motifs - it was one of the things that gave him so much sympathy with dancers. -- Kenneth Clark
The human quality Degas most admired was endurance. -- John Berger
One has to commit a painting,' said Degas,'the way one commits a crime. -- Elizabeth Bishop
I have hundreds of art books and the biographies of artists I love, such as Thomas Eakins and Edgar Degas. -- Jamie Wyeth
In Degas's compositions with several dancers, their steps, postures and gestures often resemble the almost geometric, formal letters of an alphabet, whereas their bodies and heads are recalcitrant, sinuous and individual. -- John Berger
Strange story about Degas. He hated women, didn't want to be with them. Yet he spent much of his life painting them. He had seen his father maltreat his mother, must have had a deep fear that he'd do the same thing. -- Irving Stone
In drawing after drawing, pastel after pastel, painting after painting, the contours of Degas's dancing figures become, at a certain point, darkly insistent, tangled and dusky. It may be around an elbow, a heel, an armpit, a calf muscle, the nape of a neck. -- John Berger
Only the bad artists of the nineteenth century were frightened by the invention of photography; the good ones all welcomed it and used it. Degas liked it not only because it provided an accurate record, but because the snapshot showed him a means of escape from the classical rules of design. Through it he learnt to make a composition without the use of formal symmetry. -- Kenneth Clark

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