Edgar Degas French (1834-1917)

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Image courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Image courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Ballet Dancer, Seen from Behind, ca. mid-1870's Graphite on off-white wove paper, discolored to an even beige 32.7 x 23.0 cm Bequeathed by John Bryson, 1977 WA 1977.25

A Nude Woman Drying Herself with a Towel, Seen from Behind, ca. 1880 Soft graphite, highlighted with white chalk on heavy, coarse-textured, greenish-grey paper, backed with bright blue paper 43.3 x 28.1 cm WA 1942.102

Edgar Degas (1834-1917) once stated, "No art was ever less spontaneous than mine.  What I do is the result of reflection and study of the great masters."[i]  Degas, inspired by a multiplicity of styles, including Italian Renaissance painting and sculpture, German Renaissance drawings, photography and Japanese prints, was artistically educated by the academic painter Louis Lamothe.  Well trained in the classics, Degas remained committed to drawing and studio practice throughout his life.  As a youth, Degas idolized the work Ingres for its stress on the importance of balance and clarity of outline.  During a meeting with the famed artist in 1855, Ingres implored the young Degas to "draw lines," a lesson he would follow throughout his artistic career.  After Lamothe, Degas began studies at the École des Beaux Arts, ultimately leaving in 1854 to travel south to Italy.  He remained there for close to five years, taking the time to study Italian art, particularly works of the Renaissance, while constantly sketching in his notebooks.  Degas returned to Paris in 1859, painting portraits of family and friends, as well as historical subjects in the mode of Ingres and Delacroix, combining classical and romantic styles.  During this time, Degas additionally studied the work of German Renaissance draughtsman, particularly Holbein, Cranach and Dürer, further adding to his understanding and belief in the primary importance of line.  Degas made his Salon debut in 1865 with The Suffering of the City of New Orleans, a highly disregarded work that signaled the artist's shift away from historical subject matter towards scenes of contemporary social life.  In 1874, Degas helped organize the first Impressionist exhibition, participating in seven of the eight hangings from 1874 to 1886, all the while resisting the label of "impressionist painter," instead preferring "independent" or "realist."

Degas took as his focus the human figure and through it depicted various aspects of modern society, including the café, opera, ballet and brothel.  Always drawing from life, Degas built up his compositions from numerous studies of live models, both in studio and in social spaces.  Degas' interest in bodies challenged by anatomy, the awkwardness of poses, finds parallel in classical and Renaissance influences, such as Nike fixing her sandal (Temple of Athena Nike, Athens) and Michelangelo's Slaves.  Carefully planned, Degas' pictures produce the effect of the unplanned or momentary action, displaying the appearance of the casual gesture.  Often using pastels for his preparatory studies, Degas' works exhibit the process of alteration, with fine lines and bodily adjustments apparent to the eye of the viewer.  Degas' is a style of drawing where the trace of bodily movement appears in multiple pencil markings across the paper's surface and the "…deliberately maladroit drawing procedures in which mistakes along the way count as much as premeditated intentions and careful realizations"[ii] become the overriding presence of the page.

Ballet Dancer, Seen From Behind presents a quickly sketched drawing that visually equates to the fleeting moments of the ballet studio.  The lines alter between wobbly and sharp, demonstrating the precariousness of drawing an unstable figure from life.  This work is anything but the long and laborious drawing practices of the conventional Academy in which Degas had initially engaged.  Degas used a fine pencil to construct Ballet Dancer, with the delicately drawn outlines producing not simply a recording, but an observation.  The young dancer adjusts her strap, a movement to which Degas responded by repositioning her left arm several times.  Degas concentrated on the placement of arms/shoulders and legs/feet, leaving the central section of the page to a minimal outlining of the crinoline skirt, an open and bare line with nominal shadow.  The artist lightly sketched out the shoulder strap and bodice, evoking just a sliver of support to the actual garment.  A singular line delineates the cropped features of the dancer, who glances downwards to assess her loose strap, forever caught in a moment of her own gesture, completely absorbed in herself.  The top third of the work is comprised of a variety of lines - quick and jagged, small hatch marks, dark and broad strokes - displaying a heavily worked area with multiple pentimenti.  Degas exhibited a stronger pressing of graphite under the chin and around the feet in order to denote the presence of particular shadows.  An acute observer, Degas textually rendered the appearance of reflection to the edge of the dancer's left leg, writing 'petits reflets/au bord' (a little reflection to the side), a personal note for later reference.  The feet of the dancer reveal Degas' interest in the positioning of the dancer's step, even in a moment of semi-relaxation, again focusing on the play of light and dark upon the silk of the slipper.                    

Twice stamped, with 'Degas' in the lower left of the front and 'Atelier Ed. Degas' on the verso, the work was sold posthumously in April of 1919, ultimately bequeathed to the Ashmolean in 1976 by John Bryson.  Over one hundred studies of dancers were discovered in Degas' studio after his death, a theme the artist began working on in the early 1870s.  The ballet served as a modern and particularly French subject for Degas, who saw in the ballet of his time "all that is left of the combined movements of the Greeks."[iii]  Degas, an assiduous and painstaking craftsman, saw and admired this same quality in the dancers, recognizing the irony that the illusion of effortlessness in dance is achieved only through effort.  The formalized presentation of the human body in ballet also appealed to Degas, whose interest in movement and positioning ran the gamut from running horses to bathing women.

Ballet Dancer represents a variation on a stock figure, a pose that Degas repeatedly returned to in the 1870s, 80s and 90s.  The figure appears in a drawing from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Two Dancers, ca. 1873, soon after emerging in The Dance Class, ca. 1873-75, Musée D'Orsay, as a cropped dancer on the right edge of the painting.  In a similar work at the Metropolitan, The Dance Class, ca. 1874, the strap-adjusting figure is centrally situated, pictured behind a dancer in mid-arabesque.  Additionally, the drawing closely relates to a notebook sketch by Degas, which Theodore Reff dates to around 1880, although the two works differ in several small details, such as the cut of the bodice and the directional configuration of the dancer's head.  Later in his career, Degas revisited the posed dancer, visible not only in paintings, such as Dancers, Pink and Green, ca. 1890, Metropolitan, but in his own photographs of dancers performing various bodily movements.  Refusing to retain the figure in a stationary position, Degas even depicted the dancer in a frontal view, as one in a series of twisting figures in Four Dancers, ca. 1899, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.  

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Functioning as an intermediary study, A Nude Woman Drying Herself with a Towel, Seen from Behind, presents a rare artistic move on the part of Degas.  The figure of a plump and introverted woman derives from a monotype entitled The Tub, ca. 1877-80, serving as the preparatory drawing for a revising of the monotype into a pastel.  From 1883 to 1885, Degas reworked several of his monotypes of the late 1870s, overlaying pastel onto the faint cognate, or second pull.  The female figure is a study from life, used by Degas to define the anatomy and determine the fall of light, aspects that are blurred and partly illegible in the monotype.  Degas carefully portrayed the highlighting and shading on and around the figure, utilizing white chalk for light and a smudged line of the graphite for dark, the pressed finger of the artist echoing the molding of his sculpture.  A delicate tipping of the right thumbnail with white chalk accentuates the raised arm of the woman who casually grips the edge of a towel.  Degas roughly sketched in the hair, which exudes a feeling of damp heaviness, a line quality differing from the light and attenuated outline of the towel.  He reconfigured the line of the nose and feet three times and the outline of the towel and shoulders twice, leaving the initial rendering visible on the paper.  Executed in graphite, as opposed to the charcoal or pastel that Degas frequently used in his life drawings of the 1880s, the form is delineated through a mix of light and heavy contour lines.  A secondary anomaly is the unexpected use of a heavy, coarse paper, similar to the wrapper of a sketchbook, instead of the tracing paper normally employed by Degas for his later figure drawings.  Presently faded to a greenish-gray, the original coloring of the paper is a vibrant blue, still visible on the verso of the work.  Twice stamped, 'Degas' in the lower left of the front and 'Atelier Ed. Degas' on the reverse, the work was purchased by Ambrose Vollard in 1919, sold to the Redfern Gallery, London, in 1935 and ultimately bought by the Ashmolean in 1942 for a sum of seventy-five pounds.    

Around 1886, Degas told George Moore that his aim in painting bathing women was to show "a human creature preoccupied with herself; hitherto, the nude has always been represented in poses which presupposes an audience, but these women of mine are honest and simple folk, unconcerned by any other interests than those involved in their physical condition…It is as if you looked through a keyhole."[iv]  Nude absolutely portrays a woman self-absorbed, totally and unselfconsciously naked, depicted in a gesture of familiarity with her own body.  Degas' drawing disrupts the conventions of display, graphically positioning the figure to avoid physical confrontation with the viewer.  The nude bathers of Degas garnered strongly negative responses during their various exhibitions, as the visually ambiguous figures greatly differed from the nudes of Renoir or Bouguereau, whose frontally displayed and open women could be "owned" by the male viewer.  Degas' critics directed their socio-political anger at women's changing social position in France onto his images, for in the Hausmannian modernity of Degas' Paris, people were unable to tell who was who anymore.   

The pastel to which the nude figure was eventually added, Woman at her Toilette, ca. 1880, depicts the same general setting as The Tub monotype, but within her new surroundings, the pastel woman drying herself takes on a new identity.  No longer the solitary decontextualized woman of the Ashmolean drawing, she now appears within a garishly decorated bedroom, a scene rife with brothel identifications.  Positioned parallel to a small tub, the viewer assumes that the woman has just emerged from the water, still dripping from her recent washing.  As Eunice Lipton informs us, "No precedent existed for depicting middle-class women washing themselves, because such a conceptualization was absent from contemporary thought."[v]  Bathing was not the normal and mundane event that it is today, and although French scientists and doctors emphasized the importance of cleanliness, especially after the cholera epidemics of 1832 and 1849, they warned against taking baths, due in part to inhibitions about nudity, but mainly because the water in Paris was dirty and unhealthy.  In contrast, prostitutes had to bathe, leading Lipton to read Degas' bathtubs as a sign of the prostitute.  An aside, "…the corpulence popularly attributed to prostitutes was thought to result from an excess of bathing."[vi]

Degas drew his model in Nude wearing a bracelet, the only personal accoutrement sketched in by the artist, a detail recalling the gold bracelet adorning Manet's Olympia and Nana, two women associated with prostitution.  Degas transfered the ornamental feature to the arm of the woman in Toilette, further compounding the identification of the figure with the prostitute.  The strong highlighting in Nude, emphasized by Degas through the application of white chalk, creates a sense of light that directs the eye across the body.  Felix Bracquemond equated light in painting with the power of sight, a quality associated with an active, sexualized, rational and masculine penetration of a work's surface.[vii]  By the 1850s, the verb 'voir,' to see, had entered French colloquial speech as a euphemism for sexual intercourse.[viii]  But even though we are witness to Degas' "through a keyhole" depiction of a nude woman, she resists the controlling structure of the "male gaze," naked for no one but herself at this depicted moment. 

Degas never forgot Ingres's imploration to "draw lines," remaining a consummate draughtsman throughout his artistic career.  Degas' highly observed studies of figures from life take pleasure in the momentary gesture or casual gracefulness of the human form.  The artist frequently returned to stock poses, as seen in both of the Ashmolean drawings, integrating the figures into a planned composition in a method of progressive assembly, seen in the nineteenth-century academic tradition of Ingres and Moreau.  As such, Degas, the highly progressive artist of contemporary social vignettes, never lost his connection to the classical training he received as a youth.