Musee d'Orsay

-Degas-

The Musee d'Orsay has many wonderful, and talented artists displayed around the museum, including one of my personal favorites, Edgar Degas. One of Degas paintings that continues to pique my interest is his "L'Absinth", painting, painted in 1875-1876.

This painting has a lot of symbolism and emotion within it, causing me to discover something new every time I look at it. I think Degas truly captures his time period in this painting and he captures the amount of despair that is these peoples life.

A little background, during this time France was going through their Industrial Revolution, revolving peoples life around factories and building railroads. People of all different ages were forced to work in factories, creating supplies, railings, and dealing with a lot of dangerous machinery. The working conditions were unfair, difficult, and unbearable, most people found relief in drug use as well as drinking.

One of the strongest drinks during that time was Absinth, a drink with a high alcohol content around 80% was known to affect peoples mental health, causing madness and other serious mental side-effects. Made from the highly toxic herb, wormwood Absinth can be very addictive. Due to Absinths strong effect on people, it was a popular drink for the working class, helping them forget how hard their lives are.
The painting shows a man and women in an empty Parisian bar, sitting next to one another but not speaking. The figures faces and body language display that they are not mentally all there and their facial expressions also display their mental state.
The painting is shown through Degas point of view, almost as if he was in the booth across from observing the figures and watching them slip out of reality.
The main theme in this painting is loneliness. The man and women sit next to one another but do not speak, displaying that although we can be in the company of others we can still feel alone. The man looks like he works in the railroad factories and the women are dressed a prostitute, both difficult and shameful jobs. Both these people represent Absinth addicts, shamed from society. Degas wanted to depict what was going on in his everyday life and displaying the hard things to see in life. The cafe, (Café de la Nouvelle-Athènes) that this painting is based on is one of Degas favorites as well as other artists Manet, and Van Gough.
The more I look at this painting the more I admire Degas for capturing the rawness of real life, not sugar-coating what was going on during that time, but bringing to our attention. This falls into Francis Schaeffer's Validity: displaying the reasons which the artist had for creating. Degas created most of his art displaying real life that gives the public a brand new perspective.