L'Ultimo Degas. The Latest Degas

It seems difficult to determine the position of Degas's painting within that double context, the mixed diaspora between Naturalism and Impressionism in which French art happened to be situated during the second half of the nineteenth century, and even more within the extreme variants of Symbolism, because in actual fact the clash never was between the painting of Courbet and that of the Impressionists, since they shared the wish to be faithful to nature, but between pompier painting, which was the last offshoot of a vanished Classicism, and the visual soul, the rediscovery, on which Impressionism was based, of the feeling and effects of atmospheric reality.
Degas's painting did not belong to any of these two conditions, the naturalist one or the impressionist one; in spite of its leaning towards classicism, it was treading on new ground, it was experimenting, and the painter's main goal was to "build what he saw". A similar process, the transition from naturalistic writing to experimental language, took place in literature as well, with Zola and his use of the analysis of reality through descriptive assemblage, in Le Roman Experimental. (Marco Fagioli)