Edgar Degas
Degas's work was controversial, but was generally admired for its draftsmanship. His "La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans", or "Little Dancer of Fourteen Years", which he displayed at the sixth Impressionist exhibition in 1881, was probably his most controversial piece; some critics decried what they thought its "appalling ugliness" while others saw in it a "blossoming". In part Degas' originality consisted in disregarding the smooth, full surfaces and contours of classical sculpture ... [and] in garnishing his little statue with real hair and clothing made to scale like the accoutrements for a doll. These relatively "real" additions heightened the illusion, but they also posed searching questions, such as what can be referred to as "real" when art is concerned. The suite of pastels depicting nudes that Degas exhibited in the eighth Impressionist Exhibition in 1886 produced "the most concentrated body of critical writing on the artist during his lifetime ... The overall reaction was positive and laudatory".
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
In 1907, when Picasso began to work on "Les Demoiselles", one of the old master painters he greatly admired was El Greco (1541–1614). At the time El Greco was largely obscure and under-appreciated. Picasso's friend Ignacio Zuloaga (1870–1945) acquired El Greco's masterpiece, the "Opening of the Fifth Seal", in 1897 for 1000 pesetas. While Picasso was working on "Les Demoiselles", he visited his friend Ignacio Zuloaga in his studio in Paris and studied El Greco's "Opening of the Fifth Seal." The relation between "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" and the "Opening of the Fifth Seal" was pinpointed in the early 1980s, when the stylistic similarities and the relationship between the motifs and visually identifying qualities of both works were analyzed.