Camera Obscura
In 1895,
Edgar Degas shipped a camera to his beloved sister Marguerite, who was dying in
Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she and her husband had fled from creditors. The
camera, Degas explained, was "capable of both posed and instantaneous views."
With "no more than a month of practice," she would be able to send him "a few
good portraits"--including, he specified a few days later, "some negatives that
I can have enlarged to see you better." Degas' enthusiasm for photography can't
conceal the morbid undertow of his request. He will never see her again, but
this camera might get there in time. And the negative--so apt a word in this
context--will assume her place. Degas' pragmatic association of photography
with death recalls Roland Barthes' far more melodramatic one: "Photography may
correspond to the intrusion, in our modern society, of an asymbolic Death,
outside of religion, outside of ritual, a kind of abrupt dive into literal
Death." Degas sends no consoling words to his dying sister, just a camera, and
the hope that she has a month to learn how to use it.
The
Metropolitan Museum of Art has assembled the 40 or so known photographs by
Degas, all dated (with an occasional "probable" added) during the years
1895-96. With this show the Metropolitan brings to a close an extraordinary
cycle of Degas exhibitions that began with the huge retrospective of 10 years
ago and proceeded through such lesser-known materials as Degas' monotypes, his
landscapes, and his private collection of works by other artists. The
exhibition of Degas' photographs, some of which have never before been seen in
public, raises two questions. What sort of photographer was Degas? And what do
these photographs add to our understanding of him as an artist?
You might think photography was perfectly suited to Degas.
By 1870, when he was in his mid-30s, he had left large-scale historical and
mythological subjects behind for good. No more medieval costume dramas or
Spartan youths flirting in freeze frame. Degas spent the following decade
developing an art that reflected the jostling shocks and perpetual motion of
the modern metropolis. Close-ups of musicians in orchestra pits, with
ballerinas above them, beheaded by the top of the frame. Horses jutting their
heads into one side of a picture, while carriages are chopped off by the other.
A disheveled dandy, his two daughters, and his dog, all facing in different
directions and wedged into one corner of a picture, while the broad expanse of
the Place de la Concorde takes up the remaining space. Odd croppings, odd
angles, odd encounters. Give that man a camera.
It has
often been suggested that Degas' innovative urban perspectives were influenced
by photography. But the opposite is closer to the truth. Degas' manipulations
of perspective, decentered compositions, and so on were always latent in the
practice of Western painters; he merely pushed them further than anyone else
had. The peculiar pictures that resulted made the new invention of photography,
and especially the casually composed snapshots of the 1890s and after, seem
less outrageous, more "artful." Ambitious photographers followed Degas' lead.
But Degas came around to photography as a sort of afterthought.
Degas had acquired a Kodak by the summer of 1895, when he
was 61, and he took it along for trips to spa towns and watering holes. The
amateur photography craze was such that fashionable hotels provided darkrooms
for vacationing shutterbugs. Degas took some tricky landscape shots, such as ,
where the curvature of the path and the converging trees on either side of the
road give the illusion of a dead end, against a migrating wall of trees. Back
in Paris, Degas showed no interest in pushing such plein-air experiments
further--he was no Atget in the making. After all, he had already perfected in
pastel and paint a daytime art of apparent spontaneity, with precisely the sort
of visual jokes he'd found on that tree-lined road. What Degas discovered in
photography was a nighttime art of stasis and meditative inwardness. "Daylight
is too easy," he insisted. "What I want is difficult--the atmosphere of lamps
and moonlight."
So he
turned after-dinner hours into photo shoots, marshaling guests to pose in
carefully orchestrated tableaux. The major surprise of Degas' photographs is
that the theatricality and staginess so resolutely banished from his paintings
flooded into his photographs. At a time when the Kodak camera and roll film
(first introduced in 1888) made the instantaneous "snapshot aesthetic"
possible, Degas opted for an older approach: the pose held for two or three
minutes, the long exposure, the "atmospheric" effects of lamplight on a black
ground. A night with Degas and his camera was, according to his close friend
Daniel Halévy, "two hours of military obedience." Degas knew what he wanted and
would push till he got it. Halévy recorded snippets of Degas' imperious orders:
"And you, Mademoiselle Henriette, bend your head--more--still more. Really bend
it." The twisting , one of only two surviving photographic nudes by Degas,
bends her head so far that it disappears in darkness.
Degas' photographic nocturnes evoke a Halloween world of
phantasms and ghostly intimations, with death often lurking in the shadows. In
, Louise, a sort of surrogate sister to Degas, appears to have fallen asleep,
while the lamp to the right blooms like her dream world. In (Bibliothèque
Nationale, Paris), one of a suite of self-portraits, Degas' devoted housekeeper
and cook looms above his penseur pose, her head the top of a pyramid,
like a muse figure or a protective guardian. In the most complex of Degas'
photographs, his great dual portrait of the painter Renoir and the poet
Stéphane Mallarmé (Museum of Modern Art, New York), Renoir's head is posed dead
center in the composition, with the vertical of the mirror frame bisecting his
head. In the mirror itself Degas' camera apparatus is visible, but his own head
is obliterated--the flash of genius or the death of the author--by a sunburst
of illumination.
Despite
his obsessive care in arranging shots, Degas the amateur photographer made
mistakes, and some of these led to further discoveries. He preserved some
double exposures of the Halévy family, with intersecting bodies extending
vertically and horizontally and heads emerging here and there like ghosts.
Among the most striking images in the show are three negatives of a ballet
dancer assuming poses familiar from Degas' pastels (see [Arm Outstretched]).
The glass negatives were too overexposed to print, so Degas had them treated
with chemicals to produce an orange and yellow effect like stained glass,
images for a secular chapel.
Why did Degas give up photography so soon after being
captivated by it? Had he "passed through the sadness and grief that accompanied
the death of his sister and that helped spur his photographic activity," as the
curator Malcolm Daniel asks in his catalog essay? Well, no, Daniel concedes,
since Degas continued to mourn Marguerite (who died in late October 1895), and
other close companions died during the years immediately following. Daniel
leans toward a technical explanation--that Degas "had solved the problem of the
meditative lamp-lit nocturnal portrait."
I would
suggest another cause. Many of those portraits, over a third of Degas' total
photographic output, were of the Halévy family. They were Degas' closest
friends; he dined with them regularly and treated them, at a time when his own
family was dispersed and in financial trouble, as virtually his own relatives.
Then came the accusation of treason in 1894 against the French army officer
Alfred Dreyfus, who happened to be Jewish, and the subsequent division of
French society into French nationalists convinced of Dreyfus' guilt and those
equally convinced of his innocence. Degas was in the former camp, and by 1895
would have his housekeeper Zoé read aloud from anti-Semitic tracts at the
breakfast table. Two years later, he could no longer tolerate any association
with Jews, including the thoroughly assimilated Halévys. As Daniel Halévy
reported, "An almost unbelievable thing happened in the autumn of 1897. Our
long-standing friendship with Degas, which on our mother's side went back to
their childhood, was broken off."
The art historian Linda Nochlin has traced what she calls
Degas' "perfectly ordinary" anti-Semitism to status anxiety. The Degas family
(which sometimes changed their name to "de Gas" to suggest noble roots) came to
prominence through the same international banking connections the Jewish
financiers they deplored had. When his family fell on hard times, Degas blamed
it on the Jews. One wonders whether the dark and shadowy world of his
photographs might have had some association in his mind with the ambivalence he
felt toward the Jews he posed in such excruciating positions. Degas, according
to Daniel Halévy, "carried his camera as proudly as a child carrying a
rifle."
The Dreyfus case is all but
unmentioned in the Metropolitan show and catalog. The oversight is not the
result of an effort to avoid downbeat or offensive sides of Degas, but rather a
failure to understand the seismic shift in French society caused by
"l'affaire ." Photography and French nationalism were also linked in
Degas' mind. As Daniel Halévy wrote in his diary about a visit with Degas in
December of 1895, "We went out; he talked about France, about photography,
about photography, about France, all mixed together with equal excitement."
When Degas walked out on the Halévy family, he walked out on photography as
well.
