The Paintings of Edgar Degas

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During the 19th and 20th centuries, the depiction of family life in art began to change as modernism and capitalist culture was introduced to French society. Edgar Degas, a French Impressionist painter,
Edgar Degas’ paintings on the bourgeois family life puts an emphasis on the “apartness and disjunction” of the family structure during 19th and 20th century.1 Interior with Two People represents Degas’ interest in the fragmentation and contradictions that riddle the common idea of the bourgeois family in the nineteenth century.2 The man and woman in Degas’ Interior with Two People seem to belong to the upper bourgeois class in French society as suggested by the clothing of the two. It could be speculated that Degas paints a husband and wife, yet unlike the love and intimacy commonly thought to be in a marriage, both individuals have their backs turned towards each other. In contrast to the warm colors Degas uses to paint the interior, the frigid and disjointed atmosphere of the painting symbolize the fragmentation of bourgeois family life. The woman expresses sorrow and the man, with his tense stance and fisted hand, expresses tenseness. Similar to Degas’ The Interior (also called The Rape, plate 2) or Sulking, the “yawning space between the gendered opponents and/or fragments or centrifugal composition constructs a disturbing sense of psychological distance or underlying hostility between the figures in question.”3,4,5
Corresponding to Interior with Two People, Degas’ family portrait, The Belleli Family, of his aunt Laura and her family is a painting about “the contradictions riddling the general idea of the high bourgeois family in the middle of the nineteenth century.” 6,7 The painting is considered a representation of “The ...

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...pite the joy, friendship, and amicability illustrated because the Greuze family is cut off from its neighbors and servants.
The 19th and 20th century bourgeois family relations were controlled by sex-role divisions. The husband remained to be the dominant figure in the family, providing for the family through work. The wife, thought to be weaker and less rational, was to concern herself with the home and raising the children with the “utmost attention.”22 This new degree of intimacy, however, is not shown by Degas in The Belleli Family, where Mme. Belleli, despite wrapping an arm around her daughter, remains cold and emotionless. In Interior with Two People, Degas paints the family home to be full of warmth and affection, yet, ironically the two people do not express such emotions. Ironically, in Name Day of the Madam, Degas paints a “family atmosphere,” which is “

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