Better Late Than Ever
"I look like a dog," Edgar
Degas remarked of a pastel self-portrait made when he was in his early 60s, a
century ago. Hunched forward in a coarse painter's smock, he peers forlornly at
us, his tired and damaged eyes rimmed with vermilion. What appears, at first
glance, to be a genie rising from his soft brown cap turns out, on closer
inspection, to be the sinuous arm and towel, in white chalk, of one of Degas'
own bathers, a pastel within a pastel. For Degas, who had forsworn
self-portraiture for 30 years, this double image has the weight of allegory:
The aging and celibate artist has purchased a score of creative years at the
price of physical collapse.
The
portrait captures a fraught moment in Degas' career, when he had lost interest
in the witty chronicle of modern life he'd pursued with such brilliance for 20
years--the parade of shopgirls and laundresses and jockeys and prostitutes that
had made him famous. The last of the impressionist exhibitions, in which Degas
had played so central a role, was held in 1886; afterward, he found himself
increasingly isolated as well. "I am quickly sliding downhill," he confided to
an acquaintance at the time, "rolling I know not where, wrapped up in lots of
bad pastels as if in so much packing paper."
It turned out to be a long hill. Degas lived until 1917,
when--blind, brittle, and beleaguered--he died at 82. The surprising premise of
the current exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago is that much of Degas'
most challenging and inventive work dates from the 1890s and the first years of
this century. Printed in bold letters at the entrance of the show is a
startling claim by Degas' fellow painter Auguste Renoir: "If Degas had died at
50, he would have been remembered as an excellent painter, no more; it is after
his 50 th year that his work broadened out and that he really becomes
Degas."
While the
first part of Renoir's assertion is preposterous (as anyone can see who peruses
the dozen or so early works, culled from the Art Institute's own spectacular
collection of over 90 pieces by Degas, that serve as an appetizer for the
exhibition), the show makes a convincing case for the vitality of Degas' late
work. Holed up in his squalid attic studio in Montmartre (models complained of
the dust, but Degas believed that sweeping just moved the dust around), Degas
narrowed his subject matter to a few recurrent motifs--women bathing, having
their hair combed, and dancing--while at the same time experimenting with a
remarkable range of techniques and media (photography, tracing paper, lurid
color combinations). Many of his forays "beyond impressionism," as the curators
point out, anticipate some of the titans of 20 th -century art.
Amorbid undertow pervades the early rooms of
the exhibition--apparent in the blank gaze, for instance, of Hélène Rouart
in Her Father's Study (c. 1893-'98), one of Degas' last and finest
portraits. Draped over an empty chair, the subject's expressive hands could be
playing the piano or summoning up the ghost of her recently deceased father,
whose stacks of papers and Egyptian funerary art hem her in. A frieze of four
dancers (c. 1893-'98) with gray-white bodies, their faces daubed with green and
orange, look like they've just stepped out of a grave--or a badly colorized
film. And indeed, there's something almost cinematic in the similar poses of
the dancers as they adjust their shoes, like Eadweard Muybridge's freeze frames
of bodies in motion, with which Degas was familiar.
Those green and orange faces
presage Degas' growing interest in bright color in his later work. Always
curious about technological innovation, Degas may have been excited by the new
colors made available by the chemical industry at century's end. Alternatively,
the bold hues might have resulted from Degas' wretched eyesight (those oranges
may not have looked so bright to him ), which forced him to wear tinted
glasses and keep his brown-walled studio (reproduced in the Art Institute's
brown walls) in a spectral gloom.
In any
case, little that has come before prepares the viewer for the visual shock of
the outsized Combing the Hair (c. 1892-'96). The gestures of the two
women, an attendant combing the long coil of her mistress's hair, have a
ritualized simplicity. A single brushstroke enlarges the reclining woman's
stomach, indicating her pregnancy. The whole composition is rendered in
pulsating shades of red. It seems fitting that this remarkable painting was
owned for a time by Henri Matisse, who experimented with similar monochromatic
harmonies. Those amniotic reds recur in the wrenched body of the nude figure in
After the Bath, Woman Drying Herself (c. 1894-'96). Degas based the
composition, so suggestive of pain and isolation, on one of his own
photographs, a medium in which he'd begun to experiment around 1895.
Degas was drawn to other methods besides photography for
recycling his images, using tracing paper to multiply a drawing, then
overlaying the copies with different colors to produce a range of emotional
variants. A particularly bizarre transformation occurred when he made a
charcoal copy of one of his women having her hair combed. He rotated the image
90 degrees, overlaid it with vigorous layers of pastel, and produced a
perfectly convincing landscape, Steep Coast (c. 1890-'92). The woman's
cascading hair becomes a cliff plummeting to the ocean below, while her breasts
and upraised knees are hills. The riddling result, judging from the "Ah"s and
"Oh, yeah!"s of the crowd, is as satisfying as the "hidden pictures" from a
Highlights magazine in the dentist's office. What the picture "means"--a
dubious equation of woman and nature? the virgin land?--is a further
enigma.
In
focusing the show almost entirely on technique, the organizers of "Degas:
Beyond Impressionism" have followed the lead of Degas himself, who steadily
eliminated from his work any reference to contemporary life, preferring an
artificial world of studio props and pliable models. "There is something
artificial even about this heart of mine," he wrote in 1886. "The dancers have
sewn it into a pink satin bag, a slightly faded satin, like their ballet
slippers." One is lulled into thinking that these contorted bathers are mere
exercises in the handling of pastel, and not the work of, in the poet Paul
Valéry's words, "a supremely cruel authority on female contours and poses." A
firestorm of feminist controversy already surrounds some of these works--one
side contends that these are refreshingly de-idealized nudes, the other side
responds that the unusual poses and aggressive use of pastel are further
degradations of women--but you wouldn't know it from the placid audio tour, or
from the printed "exhibition guide" that replaces the usual wall panels.
More surprisingly, there is not a single
mention of the most important public event for Degas during the 1890s, the
Dreyfus affair, when Degas didn't just look like a dog but behaved like one,
cutting off Jewish friends of long standing and adamantly insisting (along with
Paul Cézanne and Renoir) on the guilt of the Jewish army officer falsely
accused of treason. One must turn to the informative catalog, by guest curator
Richard Kendall, to learn something of this unsavory episode in Degas' life, a
further lesson that avant-garde art and retrograde politics often coexist.
Degas' very retreat from contemporary life owes something to his disgust with
French society as he found it.
Next year, the Art Institute
will try for an impressionist hat trick, as they add a Renoir show to the
successes of last year's Monet extravaganza and this year's subtler and more
demanding Degas. As boating parties replace ballerinas on the T-shirts and
umbrellas for sale along Michigan Avenue, the exhibition organizers shouldn't
shy away from social context and controversy. They can afford to risk a bit
more grit in the presentation.
N.B.:
The preceding images are not from "Degas: Beyond Impressionism" (online
reproduction of art from the Degas exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago is
forbidden. The images reproduced here are from Art Resource, N.Y.).
