Degas exhibition at NGV, Melbourne, explores artist’s Paris domain

As 200 of the prolific French artist’s works head to Australia, we venture into his Parisian stomping ground.

Group of dancers (red skirts) (1895–1900) by Edgar Degas. Burrell Collection, Glasgow

Edgar Degas was one of the most inventive, prolific and complicated artists of the 19th century. He is best known for his paintings and bright pastels of ballerinas — posters, these days, on so many walls — but he also turned his gaze to the Parisian demimonde of cafes and brothels, the racetrack and the emerging capitalist class. Many of his contemporaries — Manet, Monet and Renoir — were also painters of modern life and the Paris they knew. But none of them returned to the same subjects with the obsessive focus of Degas.

On a beautiful spring afternoon in Paris, I am walking around Montmartre Cemetery with Henri Loyrette, a former director of the Louvre and of the Musee d’Orsay. Our tiptoe through the tombstones has become a bit obsessive, too. Try as we might, we can’t find Degas’ grave.

We consult a map, retrace our steps. And then, a red herring: someone has spelled D-E-G-A-S in pebbles on a grave. Is that it? “Poor Degas,” Loyrette says of this rather modest memorial. “There is still a family, there ought to be something …”

It will be embarrassing if we can’t find Degas’ final resting place — he died almost a century ago, in 1917 — because Loyrette is a world authority on the artist. He is the curator of a scholarly exhibition coming to the National Gallery of Victoria this month. Degas: A New Vision promises to be a panoramic survey of the artist, with paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints and photographs covering more than five decades of his career.

GALLERY: Highlights of the Degas exhibition

The exhibition builds on a landmark 1988 retrospective in Paris, New York and Ottawa that put some organisation around Degas’ immense output. Loyrette, who curated that exhibition with Gary Tinterow and Jean Sutherland Boggs, says there’s now an opportunity to survey Degas again, with new research and a fresh eye for the totality of his work. After Melbourne, the exhibition will travel to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where Tinterow is director.

“It is an occasion to go back to Degas and look at him in a different way,” says Loyrette. “After working on him for such a long time, and seeing much of his work and reading what has been written on him, he’s never boring. There are always new discoveries, and new ways to see him. In this way, he is a very modern artist, very contemporary, always a work in progress.”

The exhibition will bring to Melbourne about 200 works from collections on four continents. The Museu de Arte in Sao Paulo, Brazil, is sending 19 bronzes made from Degas’ wax sculptures. They include a version of The Little Fourteen-year-old Dancer — the ballerina striking an insolent pose — that caused a scandal when first shown in 1881. (Was this fully dressed effigy “art”, or something creepy from the waxworks?)

Some of the big art museums in the US are sending their treasures, and Glasgow’s Burrell Collection is lending its paintings and pastels to an international exhibition for the first time.

And, of course, many pieces are coming from important collections in France: fragile works on paper from the Bibliotheque Nationale, prized photographs from a private collection, and Picasso’s stash of “brothel pictures” from the Picasso Museum.

The Musee d’Orsay, with its substantial holdings of Degas, is sending paintings such as Finishing the Arabesque and, at 2.5m long, the Family Portrait — a tense domestic scene and the biggest painting the artist produced.

Loyrette has agreed to take Review on a private tour of Degas’ Paris: the streets, studios, churches and theatres the artist would have known. It is important, as he says, to know the “map of artists”.

We meet at Loyrette’s apartment, not far from the Place de Clichy Metro stop. He moved here, after leaving the Louvre three years ago, partly because it is next door to a building where Degas lived for a time in the 1890s (and complained about construction noise). Loyrette’s living room has ornate moulded ceilings, brightly upholstered furniture, and shelves of books and opera LPs. Long before he became an eminent art historian and museum director, Loyrette was a student of the violin and singing.

His fascination with Degas goes back to his earliest interest in art. His grandparents lived in Zurich and had a late Degas charcoal of dancers. “It was quite intriguing, and very different from what I knew at that time,” says Loyrette, a tall, dapper Frenchman with cropped grey hair. “My grandfather explained it to me … I am more than 60 now, and when I look back at what I loved (in that drawing), I haven’t changed in a way. It is still the same attraction.”

We step outside and walk down Rue de Saint-Petersbourg past rows of shops, cafes and apartment buildings. This was Degas’ stamping ground. He was born in 1834 in a nearby area known as Nouvelle Athenes, and lived and worked around the eighth and ninth arrondissements most of his life. Artists came here for the usual reasons — affordable rents, studios with natural light, the models who lived around Montmartre — and it was a thriving creative centre, before later generations were attracted to the bohemian Left Bank. We walk past a building where Manet lived in the mid-1870s, and towards Gare Saint-Lazare, the train station painted by Manet, Monet and others as an emblem of modernising, industrialising Paris.

Turning down Rue de Londres, we go past the Trinite church and on to the Gustave Moreau museum. Up winding stairs, and past the living quarters furnished as Moreau knew them, we land on the first of two studio floors with high windows. The studios are filled with Moreau’s canvases of mythical figures — Jupiter and Semele, Leda and the Swan, and many others — painted with a feverish intensity.

It’s difficult to imagine a less likely pair of artist friends than Degas and the symbolist Moreau, who met during their youthful travels in Italy. Difficult, that is, until you consider Degas’ own treatment of history and myth. Early paintings such as Young Spartan Girls Challenging Boys (from the Art Institute of Chicago) and others from the period bear a striking similarity to Moreau’s work, with their frozen composition and fresco-like colours. But this style of history painting was a passing phase for Degas, as was the friendship with Moreau after their Roman holiday. On the way out we pause in front of Degas’ portrait of Moreau, painted around 1860.

Our next stop is the neoclassical church Notre Dame de Lorette, where Degas’ parents were married in 1832. It seems a good time as any to raise the subject of Degas’ sex life: the artist never married, and his feelings about the opposite sex are a bit of a mystery. His confirmed bachelorhood was certainly a topic of conversation among his contemporaries: Manet thought he was incapable of loving a woman.

Loyrette says he once took one of Degas’ letters to a graphologist, who came to an immediate and, as it happens, accurate conclusion. “I wanted her to analyse the writing of Degas, and the first thing she said is that he is a guy who went to brothels,” Loyrette says with a laugh. “He was not very active with women. But we know that he was buying condoms when he went to Spain, for example. And he said that he got syphilis when he was young — and that’s all we know, in a way.”

There’s genuine art-historical interest in this. Degas was fascinated with the female form and the milieu of women: the bathers getting in or out of the tub, not knowing they are being watched; the laundresses, taking a breather amid piles of washing; and, of course, the ballerinas who return time and again in Degas’ output. The obsessive, almost voyeuristic depiction of women — in sometimes contorted or unflattering poses — has led some critics to assert that Degas was misogynist, a claim Loyrette rejects. “I don’t think Degas’s depiction of women is cruel,” he says, “he treats men in the same way.”

Most remarkable is the series of brothel scenes Degas made from the mid-1870s: prostitutes splayed on the bed or sofa, their legs spread and breasts pushed up. For these works he used an intriguing medium, the monotype, in which the drawing or design is made in ink directly on a metal plate, and then an impression made on paper. In some ways the technique resembles photography — a single, instantaneous image in black and white, although Degas also used colour — and gives the brothel pictures the quality of a snapshot meant for private view. Picasso thought they were the best things Degas did.

We are not far from the former home of the Paris Opera in Rue le Peletier, where Degas from about 1870 began his ongoing series of works about the theatre: musicians in the orchestra, dancers on stage and in class, portraits of celebrated singers and dancers. When the Peletier theatre burned down in 1873, the opera, the corps de ballet and Degas moved to the neo-baroque extravaganza of the Palais Garnier. The NGV’s senior curator of international art, Ted Gott, notes that over a period of three decades, more than a third of Degas’ output was of the ballet and ballerinas. It is difficult to think of another artist who has devoted so much attention to the theatre, attracted as he was by the colours, lighting effects and the illusion of fantasy. “He was always saying, ‘What is fake makes art,’ ” Loyrette says.

Degas’s ballet pictures — dancers at the barre, in the rehearsal studio, sometimes under the watchful gaze of the ballet master — are among the defining images of the art form. Balletomanes will certainly find much to enjoy in the Melbourne exhibition, in paintings such as The Rehearsal from Glasgow and Finishing the Arabesque from the Musee d’Orsay, and in the powdery pastel colours Degas used for dancers’ costumes: pink, tangerine, turquoise, mauve and blue. Look beyond the surface textures, though, and Degas also shows the hard physical reality of dancers’ work, as they grimace, adjust their costumes and rub their sore feet.

Degas made figure sculptures to assist him with composition, but in 1881 he produced his first and only sculpture intended for exhibition. The Little Fourteen-year-old Dancer caused a sensation — at first because the display case was empty. Then the sculpture was put on display: the waxen ballerina, about two-thirds life size, dressed in a tutu, and with real hair tied with a ribbon. The model was a Belgian dancer, Marie Van Goethem, standing in for the streetwise “petits rats” who danced at the opera and supplemented their income by selling sexual favours.

The combination of youth, prostitution and underclass was only partly responsible for the scandal that ensued, Loyrette says. The wax effigy also had connotations of hyperrealist religious sculptures, of embalming techniques and the chamber of horrors.

“People looked at this little dancer as the personification of a vicious girl, the dancer linked with prostitution and low class,” he says. “That was what was written at the time. But in my opinion the sculpture was scandalous because it was wax, she was dressed, and it’s this link between life and death … To show wax dressed as a little girl: is she alive, is she dead?”

Continuing our tour to the northwest, we pass through Place Saint-Georges, cross Rue Victor Masse, where Degas lived for a time, and catch a glimpse of the gleaming white Sacre-Coeur basilica. A corner building announces itself with a sign: “Carmen”. It was the former home of composer Georges Bizet and had connections with the Halevy family, including Degas’s friend Ludovic Halevy (Carmen’s librettist) and his son Daniel.

In 1895, when Degas was in his 60s, he took up photography, and practised taking pictures with the Halevys. “After dinner, Degas would say, ‘Perhaps we could do some photographs?’ ” Loyrette says. Degas commandeered his friends for photographic sessions, arranging them for group portraits and experimenting with lighting. He also took self-portraits, such as the one coming from the Bibliotheque Nationale. Degas shows himself with his bearded chin resting on his fist and his servant Zoe standing behind him.

Degas had a bitter falling out with the Halevy family. For several years Degas, who made no secret of his anti-Semitism, and the partly Jewish Halevys had managed to avoid mentioning the Dreyfus affair that had divided Paris: the false conviction of Jewish army officer Alfred Dreyfus for treason. Then, over dinner with the Halevys one evening, some young visitors raised the topic. Degas did not visit again.

He had become a grumpy old man, frail, and often alone. In his final years, he moved to an apartment on Boulevard du Clichy, the area now famous for its bars and sex clubs. As Loyrette and I walk towards the famous Moulin Rouge nightclub, we can imagine the frail artist on his solitary walks around the district.

By this stage, his eyes were failing, and while he never went completely blind, it was difficult for him to work and to read. Nevertheless, Degas produced some of his most vibrant works in these late years, joyous compositions of rich colour that veer into abstraction. Combing the Hair, from the National Gallery in London, is painted almost entirely in reddish tones, and was once owned by Matisse.

“People say that the late works, the bright colours, [were] due to his blindness, which is not true,” Loyrette explains. “It’s an evolution of his art and the way he was seeing things ... there is a kind of melodic line which is the same throughout his career — the way he sees in different contexts and different mediums.”

Indeed, it is difficult to get your head around Degas and his immense output: one really has to see the various aspects of his artistry together and in context. Degas: A New Vision promises to be such a survey, showing the artist as an innovator who constantly experimented with formats and techniques.

His questing, exploratory artistry is especially noticeable in the works coming from the prints department of the Bibliotheque Nationale. The most conventional, from a technical point of view, may be his portrait of Manet, done in etching and drypoint. Degas also experimented with multi-colour monotypes, and with making prints from a daguerreotype plate, the result evoking the artificial light and shadows of the theatre. In his best-known print — of his American artist friend Mary Cassatt in the Louvre — he used four processes: etching, soft-ground etching, aquatint and drypoint.

In his paintings, too, Degas handles composition in a strikingly modern way. A Cotton Office in New Orleans, painted after a visit to Louisiana in 1872-73, appears to mimic or pre-empt the visual language of photography, in the way Degas handles such things as perspective, depth of field and the cropping of figures.

Tinterow, speaking from the US, says Degas has taken an ostensibly mundane subject — “It’s a painting about an office” — and filled it with so much pictorial interest. “There’s a lot of information packed into it, it’s a very engaging image,” he says. “What is remarkable about Degas is the constant experimentation. Over the course of his career, you see a faithfulness to certain themes and compositional strategy, but within that, you see this truly extraordinary experimentation, with all kinds of media, different colour palettes and an increasing expressivity.”

Loyrette and I finally make our way to Montmartre Cemetery, where visitors are enjoying the spring weather. Many famous artists and entertainers are buried here, from composers Berlioz and Offenbach, to dancer Vaslav Nijinsky and pop singer Dalida. Our search for Degas’ resting place takes us to a corner of the cemetery near the perimeter wall.

“Voila,” says Loyrette finally. Here is the Degas family vault — the name spelled the old way, “De Gas” — with a bronze profile of the artist. Degas was buried here the day after his death, at age 83, when the mourners included Monet, Cassatt and a member of the Halevy family.

Almost a century later, visitors to the NGV in Melbourne will have the opportunity to appreciate the scope of Degas’ output, which was always so much more than his popular ballerinas in tutus. For Loyrette, who has spent 40 years studying the artist, there is always something new to discover. “You always learn something, he had a long career,” Loyrette says. “He always had the same need to discover something new, never resting on a formula. That is something very interesting.”

Degas: A New Vision is at the National Gallery of Victoria, June 24 to September 18.

Matthew Westwood travelled to Paris as a guest of Art Exhibitions Australia.