Edgar Degas - Nathalia Brodskaya

The Philadelphia Museum of Fine Arts, Philadelphia.

The Ballet from “Robert le Diable”, 1871.

Oil on canvas, 66 × 54.3 cm.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

The second difference between Degas and the Impressionists was in his attitude towards drawing. Renoir and his friends had been accused of not knowing how to draw because, in their work, the vibrations of air and light had the effect of blurring their line; their colour predominated over their drawing. For Degas drawing always came first.

After the death of Degas’ father in 1873, the Degas family bank failed and there was nothing left for the painter but to rely on his art. Like the other Impressionists, he suffered from the fact that his paintings were impossible to sell and, like Renoir, Monet, Sisley, and Camille Pissarro, he went to Durand-Ruel to ask for money. And, like Sisley, he never painted commissions, he worked only on what interested him. He kept repeating, reworking, and varying his same favourite motifs, he liked improving himself. His friends recounted how he could start over and over again on one and the same work without ever fully completing it.

At the close of the 1870s, Degas added cabaret scenes to his repertoire – before Manet painted his Bar at the Folies-Bergère. What is represented in The Absinthe Drinker is, in fact, the work of a stage or film director. In 1877, Degas painted two paintings, Women on a Café Terrace, sometimes called Café, Boulevard Montmartre and Café-Concert at ‘The Ambassadors’. In these, the painter seems to be representing a moment glimpsed at random. Objectively and instantaneously the painter sets down on canvas the posturing, gestures, and expressions of the ladies as they chatter among themselves. “M. Degas seems to have hurled a challenge at the Phillistines, that is to say the classicists,” wrote the critic Alexandre Pothey in an article on the third exhibition of the Impressionists. “The women in Women on a Café Terrace are frighteningly realistic. These painted, withered creatures, reeking of vice, cynically recounting the events and gestures of the day – you’ve seen them, you know them, and you’ll come across them again on the boulevards soon” (L. Venturi, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 303).

It seems strange that as refined an artist as Degas, a frequenter of society salons, would have been aware in Paris of those washerwomen and pressers who became the objects of his study. Yet, when he was in New Orleans and felt nostalgic for France, it was the washerwomen who embodied and symbolised the French life of his time for him, to which he dreamt of returning as quickly as possible. He drew women leaning over their irons and found an original grace and beauty in their repetitive movements. His firm line set down the mechanics of their movements, while the colour, by means of a few light patches, gave the appearance of a black and white photograph as it is being developed (Two Laundresses).

He painted ballet classes during lessons and as the dancers rested. It was rare for a ballet dancer to appear on his canvases as an airy, ethereal vision. Drawing, in these instances, makes way for colour to play the principal role. In the unreal atmosphere of the stage, the pink, sky-blue, and white tutus glitter and disappear. Most often, the ballet dancer in a Degas work is shown simply as a woman exhausted from pushing herself too hard. She has lost her stage charm. She exercises endlessly at the bar, and she strains as she stretches her tired legs. She is weak and miserable. The truth of everyday life would enter in at the moments when the ballet dancer was protected from the gaze of strangers, or when, bent over with fatigue, she would have to go through the humiliation of a long wait to be seen by the theatrical director (Waiting, New York, Havemeyer Collection).

At the sixth Impressionist exhibition everyone marvelled at the wax statuette of a ballet dancer, almost one metre high, The Little Ballet Dancer. The tutu was of real white tulle, the bodice of waxed yellow canvas, the hair was knotted in a ponytail with a red satin ribbon, and the ballet slippers had yellow laces. Upright, in ballet position, her hands are behind her back, her head thrown back. “With her tarlatan petticoat, skinny, and as ugly as can be,” wrote the critic Charles Ephrussi, “but standing erect, arching back, and swaying, with that angular movement common to dance apprentices. She is rendered firmly, boldly, and with shrewdness, in a way that conveys, with infinite wisdom, the private demeanor and manner as well as the profession, embodied in the person… An ordinary artist would have turned this dancer into a puppet. M. Degas has turned her into a distinct, incisive, technically precise work, and in a truly original form” (Degas Inédit [Degas Unpublished], op. cit., p. 336–337).

The nude was no less important as an object of study for Degas: he drew it tirelessly all his life. “The same subject has to be done ten, a hundred times. Nothing in art should look like an accident, even movement” (J. Bouret, op. cit., p. 58). Movement, still more movement, always movement… Professional models would pose for Degas; his demands seemed absurd to them. Instead of sitting the young woman down or placing her, standing, in a well defined pose, he asked her to dry herself and do up her hair. Was the painter even drawing her? No: he stood standing against the wall, arms folded across his chest, watching her. Occasionally he climbed on a stool and watched her from above. Only after the model left would he begin to draw. Degas gained access to a world that, until then, had never let people from the outside come near: he represented women in their private surroundings, which belonged to them alone. He drew them in poses in which it is impossible to pose. She washes, squatting, in the bathtub. She combs her long hair, which a moment later she will toss back. Twisting around clumsily, she dries her back. Each drawing and each pastel seems to represent one image from an endless film of women washing and grooming themselves.

As he grew older, Degas made more and more sculpture. “With my eyesight going,” he said to the dealer Vollard, “I now have to take up blind men’s work” (J. Bouret, op. cit., p. 209). He modelled, in wax, what he knew best: ballet dancers, horses, and nudes. Ambroise Vollard was crestfallen to see how Degas would destroy his wax masterpieces so he could have the pleasure, as he put it, of starting them again. In his last years, Degas was almost completely blind. He died 27 September 1917. Among the group of several friends who came to accompany him to Montmartre cemetery there was only one Impressionist: Claude Monet. The other friend who had survived him, Renoir, was confined to an invalid’s armchair. In the midst of the First World War, the painter’s death went almost unnoticed.

The Dance Foyer at the Opera on the rue Le Petelier, 1872.

Oil on canvas, 32.7 × 46.3 cm.

Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

The Dancing Class (detail), c. 1870.

Oil on wood, 19.7 × 27 cm.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Orchestra Musicians, 1872.

Oil on canvas, 69 × 49 cm.

Städel-Museum, Frankfurt.

Around the time the notorious 1863 Salon des Refusés signalled the clear distinction in French painting between a revolutionary avant-garde and the conservative establishment, Edgar Degas painted a self-portrait which could hardly have looked less like that of a potential revolutionary. He appears a perfect middle-class gentleman or, as the Cubist painter André Lhote put it, like ‘a disastrously incorruptible accountant’. Wearing the funereal uniform of the 19th-century male bourgeois which, in the words of Baudelaire, made them look like ‘an immense cortège of undertakers’ mutes’, Degas politely doffs his top hat and guardedly returns the scrutiny of the viewer. A photograph taken a few years earlier, preserved in the French National Library, shows him looking very much the same, although his posture is more tense and awkward than in the painting.

The Degas in the photo holds his top hat over his genital area in a gesture unconsciously reminiscent of that of the male peasant in Jean-François Millet’s Angelus. Salvador Dalí’s provocative explanation of the peasant’s uncomfortable stance was that he was attempting to hide a burgeoning erection. Degas’ sheepish and self-conscious expression also suggests an element of sexual modesty. For an artist who once said that he wanted to be both ‘illustrious and unknown’, any speculation about his sexuality would have seemed to him an unpardonable and irrelevant impertinence.

Nevertheless, the peculiar nature of much of Degas’ subject matter, the stance of unrelenting misogyny he adopted, and the very lack of concrete clues about his personal relationships have fuelled such speculation from the beginning. As early as 1869 Manet confided to the Impressionist painter Berthe Morisot, with whom Degas was conducting a bizarre and somewhat unconvincing flirtation, ‘He isn’t capable of loving a woman, much less of telling her that he does or of doing anything about it.’ In the same year, Morisot wryly described in a letter to her sister how Degas ‘came and sat beside me, pretending to court me – but this courting was confined to a long commentary on Solomon’s proverb, ‘Woman is the desolation of the righteous’…’.

Rumours of a sexual or emotional involvement with another gifted female painter, the American Mary Cassatt, can also be fairly discounted with confidence, although the fact that Cassatt burnt Degas’ letters to her might suggest that there was something that she wished to hide. Degas’ failure to form a serious relationship with any member of the opposite sex has been attributed to a variety of causes, such as the death of his mother when he was at the sensitive age of thirteen, an early rejection in love, and impotence resulting from a venereal infection. This last theory is based on a jocular conversation between Degas and a model towards the end of his life and need not be taken too seriously.

In 1858, Degas formed an intense and sentimental friendship with the painter Gustave Moreau. The emotional tone of Degas’ letters to the older artist might suggest to modern eyes an element of homosexuality in their relationship. ‘I am really sending this to you to help me wait for your return more patiently, whilst hoping for a letter from you… I do hope you will not put off your return. You promised that you would spend no more than two months in Venice and Milan.’

But whereas Moreau’s paintings exude an air of latent or even overt homosexuality, the same cannot be said of Degas’. There are accounts of Degas chatting in mellow and contented moods with models and dancers towards the end of his life, but it seems likely that, in common with many 19th-century middle-class men, he was afraid of and found it hard to relate to women of his own class. His more outrageously misogynistic pronouncements convey a strong sense of his fear.

‘What frightens me more than anything else in the world is taking tea in a fashionable tea-room. You might well imagine you were in a hen-house. Why must women take all that trouble to look so ugly and be so vulgar?’ or ‘Oh! Women can never forgive me. They hate me. They can feel that I leave them defenceless. I show them without their coquetry, as no more than brute animals cleaning themselves!… They see me as their enemy – fortunately, for if they did like me, that would be the end of me!’

Degas’ portraits of middle-class women have faces, unlike his dancers, prostitutes, laundresses, milliners, and bathers who are usually stereotyped or quite literally faceless. On the other hand, these middle-class women may seem intelligent, rational, and sensitive, but are nevertheless a grim lot, without warmth or sensuality. Many of Degas’ female relatives seem to be overwhelmed by frigid and loveless melancholy. His nieces Giovanna and Giulia Bellelli turn from one another without the slightest trace of sisterly intimacy or affection. Grimmest of all is the portrait of his aunt, the Duchess of Montejasi Cicerale, and her two daughters in which the implacable old woman seems to be separated from her offspring by an unbridgeable physical and psychological gulf.

The theme of tension and hostility between the sexes underlies many of Degas’ most ambitious works of the 1860s, both in genre-like depictions of modern life such as Pouting and Interior (formerly known as The Rape and probably inspired by Émile Zola’s novel Thérèse Raquin) and in elaborate historical scenes such as Young Spartans Exercising and Scene of War in the Middle Ages. This last – the most lurid and sensational picture Degas ever painted – shows horsemen shooting arrows at a group of nude women. The women’s bodies show no wounds or blood, but fall in poses suggestive more of erotic frenzy than of the agony of death. From the time that Degas reached maturity as an artist in the 1870s, most of his depictions of women – apart from a few middle-class portraits – include more than a suggestion that the women are prostitutes. Prostitution in 19th-century Paris took a wide variety of forms, from the bedraggled street-walker desperate for a meal to the ‘Grande Horizontale’ able to charge a fortune for her favours. Virtually any woman who had to go out to work and earn a living was regarded as also liable to sell her body. So it was that Degas’ depictions of singers, dancers, circus performers, and even milliners and laundresses could have disreputable connotations for his contemporaries that might not always be apparent today.

A Woman Ironing, 1873.

Oil on canvas, 54.3 × 39.4 cm.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

The Dance Class, c. 1873–1876.

Oil on canvas, 85.5 × 75 cm.

Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

It was during the Second Empire (from 1852 to 1871) that Paris consolidated its reputation as the pleasure capital of Europe. That ‘love for sale’ was one of the chief attractions of Paris for foreign visitors is made abundantly clear by the operetta La Vie Parisienne composed by Jacques Offenbach for the 1867 Paris World Exhibition. The libretto, written by Degas’ close friend Ludovic Halévy and his collaborator Henri Meilhac, shamelessly celebrates Paris’ reputation as ‘the modern Babylon’ and a great focus for venal love.

Amongst the characters are a ‘Grande Horizontale’ with the outrageously punning name of Métella (roughly translatable as ‘put it in’), a pretty glove-maker called Gabrielle who might have stepped from one of Degas’ pastels of milliners, a Brazilian millionaire who wants to lose his fortune to Parisian ‘hussies’, a Swedish Baroness who longs to hear the singer Thérésa and her husband who wants to experience and enjoy everything at once jusque-là (to the fullest).