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Unidealized nudes
For one who so openly professed contempt for women,
Degas was strangely
fascinated by the female nude. But he also brutally demystifies it:
the women he depicts are wholly unideal and lacking in
individuality. Instead, his interest is in form, the figure reduced
to an animating agent. He loved, he said, to paint as if "through
the keyhole," catching his subjects when they thought themselves
unobserved. The pastel painting Girl Drying Herself is
typical. We see only the back of this young woman as she stands with
gawky tension upon her clothes. It is the rosy gleam of the light
that provides romance and the hollow and swell of her muscles as she
dries herself with animal vigor.
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Edgar Degas
Girl Drying Herself
1885
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Edgar Degas
Women Combing her Hair
1885
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Edgar
Degas
(Encyclopaedia Britannica)
born July 19, 1834, Paris, Fr.
died Sept. 27, 1917, Paris
French artist, acknowledged as the master of drawing the human
figure in motion (see ). Degas worked in many mediums, preferring
pastel to all others. He is perhaps best known for his paintings,
drawings, and bronzes ofballerinas and of race horses.
Degas came of the powerful upper bourgeoisie, his family having
bankingand business connections both in Italy and in the United
States, and he was intended for the law, which he studied for a time
after leaving the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. In 1855, however, he
enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts and entered the studio of Louis
Lamothe, a pupil of the painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, whose
long-established position as defender of academic orthodoxy in
draftsmanship and subject matter was being challenged by the realism
of Gustave Courbet as well as by the romanticism of Eugène
Delacroix.
It seems likely that as a young man Degas wished to succeed along
orthodox lines as a painter of historical subjects in the grand
French tradition. To further his aim he augmented his studies by
visiting Florence, Assisi, Rome, and Naples and by closely observing
and copying the works of Andrea Mantegna, Sandro Botticelli, Hans
Holbein the Younger, and Nicolas Poussin, all notable for their
scrupulousness in figure draftsmanship. Before 1860 Degashad
produced some splendid family portraits in which the effect of this
discipline, though clear, is heightened by a taut,alert urbanity
that belongs unmistakably to the mid-19th century. The “Portrait of
the Duchess of Morbilli” is typical ofthis group. It is broadly
designed with large, simple surfaces rather flatly modeled in the
manner of Ingres; the paint is solid, yet delicate, and the colours
cool and restrained, with many black and neutral passages. In 1860
Degas made his debut as a painter of classical subjects with his
“Young Spartans Exercising”; but here the nude figures, though
arranged in balanced groups, are those of real adolescents ina
natural landscape instead of idealized nudes in an Arcadian setting.
After 1861, when Degas painted “Semiramis Founding Babylon,” again
with academic intentions, he seems to have abandoned historical
painting and begun to seek his subject matter in the fast-moving
city life of Paris. In this he was probably inspired by
contemporaries like Courbet and Édouard Manet (whom he met in 1862),
by contemporary novelists, and by the discovery, late in the 1850s,
of the astonishing formal yet documentary quality of Japanese
graphic art. Nor did he overlook the brilliant work of contemporary
French graphic artists such as Paul Gavarni and Honoré Daumier. It
is not surprising that by 1862 he was painting the riders, their
mounts, and the smart spectators atLongchamp racecourse, soon
afterward beginning the portrait groups of musicians and stage
subjects, which, like all subjects in which the sitters were
absorbed in practiced movement, fascinated him throughout his life.
Among the first of the latter is the “Mlle Fiocre in the Ballet ‘La
Source'.” His portraits of the 1870s show greater ease and
naturalism than the very first group but are still based on a
discipline traceable to Holbein and the great north Italian
portraitists.
Degas served in the artillery during the Franco-German War of
1870–71. On his return, he began to undertake ambitious figure
groups, seen informally and in movement, and continued his studies
of stage and orchestral groups. From these he passed to
instantaneous renderings of both outdoorand indoor scenes, using
displaced figure grouping and unorthodox cutting and perspective
rather in the manner of acameraman. Yet his magnificent formal sense
and skill is always present to provide an equilibrium, however
momentary, to these exacting subjects. The “Place de la Concorde (Vicomte
Lepic and His Daughters)” is a fine example and an outdoor
counterpart to the ballet subjects that gave Degas endless scope for
multifigure groups seen in fast intercepted movement. Degas visited
the United States in October 1872, staying for five months and
painting one of his best-known scenes of figures in absorbed
“occupational” movement. This was the “New Orleans Cotton Office” of
1873; it shows that although Degas had completely abandoned his
early ambition of historical figure painting, he had, nevertheless,
put to full use the structural principles of the formal tradition.
During the 1870s, most of Degas's figure groups were arranged
against fairly extended background space, in whichthe figures
themselves were given plenty of room. By the end of the decade,
however, he was becoming interested in the pictorial possibilities
of more closely juxtaposed and superimposed groups and giving more
attention to the formal qualities of the voids between them. The
famous “Repasseuses” (“Two Laundresses”) of 1884 shows this tendency
at an advanced stage, with an artificially shallow picture space and
a reconciliation of solid form and surface reminiscent of Venetian
mid-16th-century art in method but here applied with a documentary
eye to a casual workaday subject. By this time Degas had begun to
work in pastel, sometimes using a mixed technique with volatile oil
mediums, and his indoor series of women at their ablutions carries
on the researches mentioned above. Some of the later ones reach an
astonishing compromise between plasticity and surface pattern, the
flesh colours being built up of strips of pure colour more closely
knit than the taches of the Impressionists but, like them, merging
at a certain distance to give the illusion of solid modeling.
After 1880 Degas was practicing occasionally as a sculptor, and a
group of small bronzes deriving from his models of dancers, bathing
women, and horses again show his power of revealing the
potentialities of the ordinary unobserved movements of human beings
and animals. Degas, in fact, perhaps for the first time in history,
viewed his animal and human models with the same dispassionate eye
when making these studies. He was interested in photography,
and there is an affinity between his vision and that of a high-speed
camera. Degas's eyesight failed in later life; he became completely
blind in one eye and nearly so in the other. At his death he left an
important collection of the drawings and paintings of his
contemporaries and a notebook of poetic compositions, mostly in
sonnet form.
David Christopher, Traherne Thomas
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Edgar Degas
Young 14 year old Dancer
Bronze and patina
Musee d'Orsay' Paris
Degas's dancers
Over half of Degas's paintings depict the young ballerinas who
performed
between the main acts at the Paris Opera.
Although Degas painted the dancers in intimate behind-the-scenes
situations, he viewed them with a cool detachment.
Only one of Degas's ballet sculptures was exhibited (in 1881), and
at the time
it was considered unusually realistic because Degas dressed the
sculpture in real clothes.
This illustration shows a bronze sculpture of a young dancer, based
on a number
of pencil sketches.
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Edgar Degas
L'Etoile
1878
Musee d'Orsay
Paris Degas
interpreted this subject in many different ways.
Here, the ballerina
shines on her own before the other artists,
seen hazily in the
background.
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THE THEATRE
Degas was a regular attender of the cafe-concerts at Montmartre and
the Champs-Elysees. At the Ambassadeurs, a cafe frequented by
Toulouse-Lautrec, he made a number of pastel drawings. In
The
Cafe-Concert at the Ambassadeurs (1875-77), the spectators
(ourselves included) and the orchestra are seated in shadow against
the sparkling lights in the background where the entertainment is
taking place. This arrangement, which could be regarded as
voyeuristic, is repeated in his Orchestra of the Opera (1868-69).
Here, our gaze is directed upwards over the heads of the musicians,
towards the blurred, barely visible images of the performers on
stage. Flickers of light illuminate the legs and tutus of the
anonymous ballerinas. In contrast, the images in the foreground are
sharp and obviously painted with meticulous care.
Degas has included
the composer Emmanuel Chabrier among the musicians.
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Edgar Degas
The Cafe-Concert at Les Ambassadeurs
1875-77
Musee des Beaux-Arts, Lyons
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Edgar Degas
Orchestra of the Opera
1868-69
Musee d'Orsay, Pans
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FLEETING EXPRESSIONS
In
Degas' work, harmony and beauty are systematically sacrificed to
expression. A woman yawning or bent over her iron, or a young girl
lacing up her ballet shoe, recreates an everyday attitude that,
rather than telling us about the person, conceals her behind a
mysterious veil. The figures are not disclosed to us; instead, they
remain silent and aloof, beyond our reach.
In
Degas' Singer with a
Black Glove (1878), the gloved arm becomes the visual centre of the
composition, creating a sense of instability in the figure depicted.
The grimaces of Yvette Guilbert and the gestures of her hands say
far more than a conventional portrait could about this unusual
woman, who entertained at the cafe-concerts and who, "with her white
dress, black gloves, and haunted face, could truly appear like a
fragile figure evaporating from a bottle of ether" (Edmond de
Goncourt).
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Edgar Degas
Singer with a Black Glove
c. 1878
Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge,
Massachusetts
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Edgar Degas:
The Rehearsal on the Stage
1873
A look behind the scenes
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Edgar Degas
The Rehearsal on the Stage
1873
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At his death in 1917, the eighty-three-year-old Edgar Degas left
behind some 1200 paintings and sculptures, more than 300 of them
depicting ballerinas: at the bar, at their toilet, resting, or
rehearsing - witness the present work - on a half-lit stage. It was
through Degas that ballet attained its renown as a subject of
painting, though by Degas' time, the stage art itself was in dire
need of innovation.
The history of ballet had begun some 300 years earlier in the form
of a ceremonial courtly dance whose function was to demonstrate the
glory of the sovereign. Only "when ballet became professional were
the dancers joined by women. During the Romantic era, the female
dancers became the centre of attraction, appearing to float across
the stage, scorning gravity. The new technique of the toe dance made
ballerinas more suited to typical Romantic parts, such as elves,
spirits or fairies. Their male partners receded into the background,
their main task from now on to support or lift the ballerinas,
emphasizing the latters' lightness and grace.
The Romantic ballet was born in the 30s and 40s of the 19th century
and, in Paris, was the dominant style even when Degas came to paint
the present picture in 1873. In literature and theatre, Romanticism
had been largely repudiated by more realistic modes, while in Italy,
a choreographer had attempted to convert current events, like the
construction of a tunnel through the Alps, into dance. No such
development took place in Paris, however, where the theatre-going
public stuck largely to what it knew.
Degas's exclusive preference for female dancers, too, conformed to
contemporary taste. Eventually, helped by Tchaikovsky's music,
ballet was given a new lease of life at St. Petersburg; but it was
not until the 20th century that male dancers regained some of the
recognition they had once enjoyed.
In 1873, when Edgar Degas painted this picture, "tout Paris"
revelled in the romance of the ballet. But the elegance and grace of
the ballerinas, who appeared to float across the stage, was not its
only source of appeal. It was the done thing for a Parisian
gentleman of leisure to maintain a "lia-son" at the theatre, while
dancing offered many girls their only opportunity to escape from
poverty. The painting The Rehearsal on the Stage■, measuring 65 x 81
cm, is now in the Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
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"Long, lascivious legs"
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Edgar Degas
The Rehearsal on the Stage (detail) |
The lighmess of the Romantic technique allowed the ballerinas to
lay aside all heavy clothing and shoes. Elves floated better without
such unnecessary ballast: ballet shoes were now made without their
formerly wide soles and heels, and the ballet costume itself was
reduced to a sleeveless bodice and flared skirt of white muslin. The
skirt billowed when the ballerina alighted, prolonging the illusion
of her floating gently to earth. Originally calf-length, the skirt
had shortened to the knee by Degas's day.
Ballerinas had now begun to reveal more of their bodies, especially
their legs, covered only by thin tights. Though this favoured
artistic expression, it was also seen as an affront to conventional
morality; for it was considered indecent in the nineteenth century
for ladies to show their legs. Heinrich Heine cites two English
ladies who "were barely able to express their disgust at what met
their eyes when the curtain rose and those wonderful, short-skirted
ballerinas began a graceful, elaborate movement, stepping out with
long, lovely, lascivious legs and, with a sudden bacchanalian leap,
falling into the arms of the male dancers who came springing towards
them ... Their busoms grew pink with indignation. 'Shocking! For
shame, for shame!', they constantly groaned."
Understandably, few male spectators showed siens of outrage. Unlike
women and girls, men were given more or less free rein to seek
gratification for their erotic urges. For them, ballet took on a new
meaning, and the pronounced tendency among 19th-century
choreographers to bring ballerinas up to the footlights more
frequently than their male colleagues surely cannot be ascribed
solely to the artistic gain derived from the introduction of the toe
dance.
The ladies in the boxes may occasionally have been consoled by the
knowledge that their stage rivals were deemed unmarriage-able. From
low-class backgrounds, with perhaps a laundress or seamstress as a
mother, they were as likely as not to have grown up in a one-room
flat at the back of some dingy close. The theatre offered one of the
few opportunities to escape a life of poverty and misery. With luck,
they would be accepted, at the age of eight or nine, into the Opera
dance school, the Academic Royale. They made their first stage
appearance at the age of 14 or 15, and retired 20 years later.
Though a girl of mediocre talent might never be more than an
ordinary dancer in the corps de ballet, earning no more on stage
than she would as a seamstress, she nonetheless had a better chance
as a ballerina of attracting the attentions of a wealthy gentleman.
She was in dire need of his self-centred favours if she were to
escape from hunger and her dingy close. Apart from anything else,
male patronage could be advantageous in determining the outcome of
professional rivalry between dancers.
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Rear view of a career
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Edgar Degas
The Rehearsal on the Stage (detail)
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The biography of almost every 19th-century Parisian ballerina
contains the name of a rich, and more or less powerful, patron. One
example serves to illustrate many: that of Emma Livry and her
mother. Emma's mother, an unsuccessful ballerina at the Paris Opera,
had become the mistress of a baron; Emma was their child. The baron
eventually left Emma's mother to marry a princess, and was replaced
by a viscount. The viscount was said to have had a whole string of
relationships with ballerinas. He "knew all the scandals and
intrigues, was informed of all the storms in teacups that constantly
shook this small, inward-looking world. He liked to intervene, too,
taking sides, hoping to influence matters to further his own
interests and, more importantly, those of his mistress."
He also exerted his influence to help Emma, the daughter of his
mistress. He ensured that her debut in the corps de ballet did not
go unnoticed, put in a good word for her with the director of the
Opera, used his good offices in the imperial household, negotiated
her contract himself, and even protected her against a series of
intrigues designed to delay the premiere. In the end Emma Livry's
performance in "La Sylphide" in 1858 was a sensational success; she
was 16 years old at the time. She died at the age of 21, her short
skirt set alight by a gaslamp behind the scenes.
Patronage of ballerinas was a pleasure-able diversion for gentlemen
of leisure from traditionally affluent backgrounds. Since the latter
were disinclined to be punctual, the ballet were not introduced
before the second act. The Paris premiere of Richard Wagner's "Tannhauser",
with ballet included in the first act, was booed out in 1861. Though
not the only reason for the flop, premature entry of the dancers was
certainly a major contributive factor.
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The power of subscribers
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Edgar Degas
The Rehearsal on the Stage (detail)
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The ballerinas in Degas's painting are nameless, like the
gentleman sitting on the chair. He may be the director or
choreographer, or perhaps the especially privileged friend of one of
the girls. The theatre itself is easily identified: the Grand Opera
in the Rue Le Peletier. It was here that Emma Livry's star rose so
briefly, and here, too, that Richard Wagner's Tannhauser flopped.
The theatre in the Rue Le Peletier had 1095 seats; it became the
Grand Opera as a result of an assassination in 1821. The son of the
French heir to the throne was attacked near the building in the Rue
de Richelieu which had housed the opera hitherto. The injured man
was carried into the theatre. Meanwhile, his friends sent for the
Archbishop of Pans to administer the last sacrament to the dying
man. However, the bishop agreed to enter the building only on
condition that it was torn down afterwards. This was done - an
impressive demonstration of the Church's power in its struggle
against the theatre as an immoral institution.
The narrow boxes vaguely indicated behind the sitting gentleman were
a characteristic feature of the new Grand Opera in the Rue Le
Peletier. These boxes, built above rather than in front of the
stage, were referred to as baignoires or boites tiroirs,
in other words as "baths" or "drawers". They were reserved for the
director, or for influential subscribers who were more interested in
physical proximity than the aesthetic experience.
The power of subscribers had continually grown in the 19th century.
The future of a theatre now depended less on the good will of a
local ruler than on its ability to sell seats. Subscribers could
rent a box, or a seat in the stalls (for men only), which, during
the season, they occupied at least once a week. Their interest was
in constant need of renewed stimulus, and in their attempt to
provide it, theatres would occasionally seek recourse to methods
that were less than artistic: in 1831 the Director of the Grand
Opera allowed access to the Foyer de la Danse, the dancers'
rehearsal room, to some of his more refined clientele. Degas would
often sit there himself, sketching the scene. It was a large room
with a golden frieze below the ceiling and imitation marble columns
along the wall, a high mirror and the usual training bars, hardly
comparable with those neon-lit, highly functional rooms with mirrors
covering all four walls in which today's dancers practise their
steps.
The Foyer de la Danse was open, during intervals and after the
performance, only to the girls' mothers and certain male
subscribers. The purpose of this was obvious. The modern equivalent
might be the welcome-lounge of a massage parlour.
In October 1873 the theatre in the Rue Le Peletier was destroyed by
fire. A new, magnificent building, the Palais Gamier, where ballets
are still performed today, was opened in January 1875. A competition
for the design of the new opera house was held in 1860. Both the
text of the announcement and, ultimately, the building itself
betrayed the social function of opera at the time: artistic
performance seen as the appropriate ambience for the cultivation of
social status and gratification of the male libido. Boxes, according
to design recommendations, were to have an adjoining salon whither
parties who wished to converse might withdraw. The plans were to
include "drawers", too, which remained in use until 1917. The
building was to have three separate entrances: one for the Emperor,
who no longer existed after 1870, one for the subscribers and a
third for the public. The broad staircase to the first floor,
imitating the stairway at the Rue Le Peletier, had 63 steps. The
much cosseted subscribers were not expected to alter their habits.
They were provided with a special lounge for intervals, and the
Foyer de la Danse was transformed into a palatial hall with
chandeliers, stucco and the portraits of famous ballerinas. At the
same time, however, the director raised the entry fee; only
gentlemen who subscribed three evenings a week were allowed access.
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Like looking through a keyhole
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Edgar Degas
The Rehearsal on the Stage (detail)
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Degas made the preliminary sketches for his painting in one of
the front boxes, executing the painting some time later in his
studio. By the time he painted The Rehearsal on the Stage,
the theatre in the Rue Le Peletier had probably burned down. Like
all contemporary stages, it was lit by dangerous, open gas flames.
The lights were generally situated at the edge of the apron. Degas
marks the footlights with a series of bright brushstrokes.
He was almost 40 at the time, but was not one of the ballerinas'
lovers. On the contrary, he lived the life of a reclusive ascetic,
rarely leaving his studio. He needed to be alone, remaining a
bachelor, declaring, on one occasion: "A painter has no private
life!"
Besides ballerinas, there were two other subjects he favoured: women
at their bath and jockeys at the races. All three have one thing in
common: movement. The details printed here make it clear that Degas
was less interested in the ballerinas as individual characters than
in their movement and gestures. Their faces are usually pale,
anonymous. With regard to their gestures, what interested him most
was what they did more or less subconsciously when they were not
playing to the public. Degas paintings are full of women combing,
washing and dressing themselves - automatically, as it were. "Up
until now, the portrayal of nudidity has always presupposed exposure
to the public eye", he wrote, "but the women in my paintings are
simple, good people, thinking of nothing and preoccupied with
nothing but their own bodies"; it was "like looking through a
keyhole." On another occasion he referred to them as "animals in the
act of washing themselves".
In the The Rehearsal on the Stage, too, the girls
stand or sit about quite unself-con-sciously: yawning, scratching,
stretching, utterly self-absorbed and attending to their own needs.
There was a grace here which fascinated Degas. It was a quality he
found in dancers who were resting between scenes, but also - on few
and fortunate occasions, and with a different level of intensity -
in those who were actually dancing: it was not the natural grace of
a woman which interested him then, but a grace she had acquired by
dint of artistry, the grace of a ballerina who is entirely engrossed
in her art.
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see collection:
Edgar Degas
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