Leiden University Student Repository

Neelissen, Andrea (2024)

Pieces of the Present: The Significance of Fragmentation in the Work and Life of Edgar Degas

Bachelor thesis | Kunstgeschiedenis (BA)

A greatly experimental artist as well as a nostalgic traditionalist, Edgar Degas had a deeply complex relationship with the process of fragmentation. Through an exploration of a selection of works from his oeuvre, as well as a brief discussion of his own home, I aim to show how fragmentation is related to Degas’ realist aims of examining contemporary society. Degas created art that proudly showed fragmented objects and made works that could be considered ‘fragments of time’ themselves. He did so by inventively cropping and cutting compositions, employing the temporal and material dimensions of fragmentation in order to explore modern life. At the same time, he was deeply distraught by the state of modernity, and the carelessness of others in treating their belongings. He appreciated objects that were conventionally seen as broken to the point of worthlessness and exhibited them in his home, where they formed a new unity in their relation to other objects.

Degas

Fragmentation

Temporality

Realism

Nochlin

Author

Neelissen, Andrea

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Specialisation

Arts, Media and Society

Supervisors

S.M. Lauritano Ph.D.

ECTS Credits

10

Language

en