There is love, he once said, and there is a life’s work and one only has one heart. So he chose. He put his heart into his life’s work. I hope to show to what effect.
His mother, a French American from New Orleans, died when he, her first-born, was only thirteen years old. Apparently, no other woman ever entered into his emotional life. He became a bachelor, looked after by housekeepers. Due to the family banking business he had few material worries. He collected paintings. He was cantankerous. Was called ‘a terrible man’. Lived in Montmartre. During the Dreyfus Affair he assumed the conventional anti-Semitism of the average bourgeois. The later photos show a frail old man, kippered by solitude. Edgar Degas.
What makes the story strange is that Degas’ art was supremely concerned with women and their bodies. This concern has been misunderstood. Commentators have appropriated the drawings and statues to underwrite their own prejudices, either misogynist or feminist. Now, eighty years after Degas stopped working, it may be time to look again at what the artist left behind. Not as insured masterpieces — the market value of his work has long been established — but as an aid to living.
Pragmatically. Between 1866 and 1890 he made a number of small bronzes of horses. All of them reveal an intense and lucid observation. Nobody before — not even Géricault — had rendered horses with such a masterly naturalism and fluency. But around 1888 a qualitative change takes place. The style remains exactly the same, but the energy is different. And the difference is flagrant. Any child would spot it immediately. Only some art moralists might miss it. The early bronzes are of horses seen, marvellously seen, out there in the passing, observable world. The later ones are of horses, not only observed but quiveringly perceived from within. Their energy has not just been noted, but submitted to, undergone, borne, as though the sculptor’s hands had felt the terrible nervous energy of the horse in the clay he was handling.
The date of this change coincides with Degas’ discovery of Muybridge’s photographs, which showed for the first time how the legs of horses actually moved when cantering and galloping. And Degas’ use of these photographs accords perfectly with the positivist spirit of the epoch. What brought about the intrinsic change, however, defies any positivism. Nature, instead of being an object of investigation, becomes a subject. The later works all seem to obey the demands of the model rather than the will of the artist!
Yet perhaps we may be mistaken about the will of this particular artist For instance, he never expected his statues to be exhibited: they were not made to be finished and presented. His interest in them lay elsewhere.
When Ambrose Vollard, the Impressionists’ dealer, asked Degas why he didn’t have his statuettes cast in bronze, he replied that the tin and copper alloy known as bronze was said to be eternal, and he hated nothing more than what was fixed!
Of the seventy-four Degas sculptures that exist in bronze today, all but one were cast after his death. In many cases the original figures, modelled in clay or wax, had deteriorated and crumbled. Seventy others were too far gone to be redeemed.
What can we deduce from this? The statuettes had already served their purpose. (Towards the end of his life Degas stopped exhibiting anything.) The statuettes were not made as sketches or preparatory studies for some other work. They were made for their own sake, yet they had served their purpose: they had reached their point of apogee and so could be abandoned.
The apogee point for him was when the drawn entered the drawing, when the sculpted passed into the sculpture. This was the only rendezvous and transfer that interested him.
I can’t explain how the drawn enters a drawing. I only know that it does. One gets closest to understanding this when actually drawing. On Degas’ tombstone in the cemetery of Montmartre the only words written are: ‘Il aimait beaucoup le dessin.’ (‘He liked drawing very much.’)
Let us now think of the charcoal drawings, pastels, monotypes and bronzes of women. Sometimes they are presented as ballet dancers, sometimes as women at their toilette, sometimes (particularly in the monotypes) as prostitutes. Their presentation is unimportant: the ballet, the bathtub or the bordel were, for Degas, only pretexts. This is why any critical discussion about a pictorial ‘scenario’ usually misses the point. Why was Degas so fascinated by women washing themselves? Was he a keyhole voyeur? Did he consider all women tarts? (There is an excellent essay by Wendy Lesser in her book His Other Half in which she dismantles such questions.)
The truth is that Degas simply invented or used any occasion to pursue his study of the human body. It was usually women’s bodies because he was heterosexual and so women amazed him more than men, and amazement is what prompted his kind of drawing.
Straightaway there were people who complained that the bodies he depicted were deformed, ugly, bestial, contorted. They even went so far as to assert that he hated those he drew!
This misunderstanding arose because he disregarded the conventions of physical beauty as conventionally transmitted by art or literature. And, for many viewers, the more a body is naked, the more it should be clothed in convention, the more it should fit a norm, either a perverse or an idealised one; the naked have to wear the uniform of a regiment! Whereas Degas, starting from his amazement, wanted each profile of the particular body he was remembering, or watching, to surprise, to be improbable, for only then would its uniqueness become palpable.
Degas’ most beautiful works are indeed shocking, for they begin and end with the commonplace — with what Wendy Lesser calls ‘the dailiness’ of life — and always they find there something unpredictable and stark. And in this starkness is a memory of pain or of need.
There is a statuette of a masseuse massaging the leg of a reclining woman which I read, in part, as a confession. A confession, not of his failing eyesight, nor of any suppressed need to paw women, but of his fantasy, as an artist, of alleviating by touching — even if the touch was that of a stick of charcoal on tracing paper. Alleviating what? The fatigue to which all flesh is heir …
Many times he stuck additional strips of paper on to his drawings because, master that he was, he lost control of them. The image led him further than he calculated going, led him to the brink, where he momentarily gave way to the other. All his late works of women appear unfinished, abandoned. And, as with the bronze horses, we can see why: at a certain instant the artist disappeared and the model entered. Then he desired no more, and he stopped.
When the model ‘entered’, the hidden became as present on the paper as the visible. A woman, seen from the back, dries her foot which is posed on the edge of a bath. Meanwhile the invisible front of her body is also there, known, recognised, by the drawing.
A feature of Degas’ late works is how the outlines of bodies and limbs are repeatedly and heavily worked. And the reason is simple: on the edge (at the brink), everything on the other, invisible, side is crying out to be recognised and the line searches … until the invisible comes in.
Watching the woman standing on one leg and drying her foot, we are happy for what has been recognised and admitted. We feel the existent recalling its own Creation, before there was any fatigue, before the first brothel or the first spa, before the solitude of narcissism, at the moment when the constellations were given names. Yes, this is what we sense watching her keeping her balance.
So what did he leave behind, if it wasn’t finished masterpieces?
Do we not all dream of being known, known by our backs, legs, buttocks, shoulders, elbows, hair? Not psychologically recognised, not socially acclaimed, not praised, just nakedly known. Known as a child is by its mother.
One might put it like this. Degas left behind something very strange. His name. His name, which, thanks to the example of his drawings, can now be used as a verb. ‘Degas me. Know me like that! Recognise me, dear God! Degas me.’