Degas exhibition at NGV explores the mind of a master

The NGV’s blockbuster Degas exhibition gives a fascinating insight into the French artist’s work.

The Rehearsal (c.1874) by Edgar Degas depicts the ‘little rats of the opera’.

This is an exceptional exhibition — the most comprehensive survey of Edgar Degas’s work mounted since 1988 — and it is a credit to the National Gallery of Victoria to have secured it for Australia. Henri Loyrette, former director of the Louvre in Paris, has selected the works and written the catalogue, which no doubt has helped to attract a wealth of loans. The show has been mounted by the NGV in collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, where it will travel to next.

International loan exhibitions are often patchy in quality and filled out with secondary work, at worst leaving inexperienced visitors wondering why such a fuss is made about a celebrated artist. Here, on the contrary, audiences will discover many of Degas’s most famous and important works as well as others they never may have seen. As well as paintings, it includes an extensive selection of drawings, pastels, prints in various media — particularly etching and monoprints — and bronze sculptures, all but one of which were cast after his death.

The exhibition reminds us that Degas, although conventionally counted among the impressionists because he exhibited with them, had little in common with their artistic aims. He was not interested in plein-air painting or in capturing evanescent effects of light and atmosphere. He was a better draughtsman and had a far deeper connection with the tradition of classical art than any of his contemporaries, yet he ended up being in many respects more innovative and daring than any of them.

We can see this particularly in his relation to the figure, where he begins by seeking to master classical technique and making an attempt at history painting but in the end finds his own entirely personal and inimitable way to deal with the body as subject. But his printmaking, too, is astonishingly bold and even his rare landscapes, especially the late ones based on real scenery but done from memory, are quite unlike anything produced by his contemporaries.

Degas was born into a well-to-do and cultivated family with branches in Paris, Naples and New Orleans, and wealth derived from banking, stockbroking and cotton trading. Much of his early work takes the form of portraits of members of this family, in drawing and in painting. We can see the influence of Ingres, the pupil of David who had become the doyen of the neoclassical tradition. The impressionists, in contrast, tended to consider Ingres’s rival, the romantic Delacroix, as their predecessor.

Several early drawings emulate the precision and subtlety of Ingres, the first artist to realise the aesthetic potential of the newly invented lead pencil. The early painting of the artist’s brother Rene de Gas (1855), who later was to destroy the family fortune, is similarly indebted to Ingres, but by the time of his double portrait of his sister Therese and her husband Edmondo Morbilli he has made the idiom his own, combining exquisite technical mastery with breathtaking sensitivity to characterisation.

There is a small but powerful portrait of his 87-year-old grandfather Hilaire, the head of the family whom he had gone to visit in Naples in 1857, and in the following year, staying in Florence with Hilaire’s daughter Laura (his own father’s sister), he began the largest and most elaborate of his family pictures, La Famille Bellelli. Hilaire had died in August 1858 and the painting shows Laura dressed in mourning, a little red chalk drawing of her father on the wall behind her.

The painting is a remarkable exercise in formal and expressive composition, clearly revealing the strained relations between Laura and her husband Gennaro, who sits at an uncomfortable angle to the family and leans in awkwardly; the two daughters, both studies in the subtlety of figure composition, further separate their parents.

Both the formal elegance and the pitiless clarity of the Bellelli family painting derive from the conventions of Renaissance perspective, in particular the assumption that the viewer of a picture stands perpendicular to the ground and that his line of sight is parallel to the ground. The verticals and horizontals that appear throughout the composition are like the visible parts of an otherwise virtual spatial matrix, which also governs the predominantly frontal poses of the figures.

Just a few years later, though, the much smaller painting ACotton Office in New Orleans (1873) has a different and more self-consciously modern feel, once again due essentially to compositional choices. Here too the figures are members of the extended Degas family. The busy office would look stilted if forced into the rationalising conventions of perspective. So it is not seen by an impersonal observer, standing outside the space and with a strictly horizontal sightline, but from a viewpoint within the office itself, so close that it is forced to look down on the seated figure of the artist’s uncle Michel Musson, seated in the foreground and cut off by the frame.

This close view, recalling the casualness of photographic composition, is in fact familiar from early Netherlandish painting, in which foregrounds regularly slope steeply upwards. More than anything it situates the viewer as participant, which can be acutely uncomfortable in a painting such as L’Absinthe (1876), where the tilting foreground space is occupied by a sequence of marble table tops like shards of glass.

Apart from portraits, the young Degas tried his hand at history painting, and the exhibition includes his early Alexander and Bucephalus (1861-62), anticipating his later interest in the subject of horses, and the unusual theme of Spartan girls challenging boys to an athletic contest (c. 1860) — unusual because it is virtually without precedent and because it does not refer to any particular story. Following in a long line of artists and intellectuals fascinated by the culture of Sparta, whose quasi-totalitarian form of militaristic socialism was the antithesis of democratic Athens, Degas evidently was drawn to the idea that Spartan girls were reared in the same athletic culture as the boys.

There is, as a result, a minimal difference between the physiques of the two sexes in this picture, a point of particular interest when we consider that all of Degas’s mature work ponders the otherness of the female. History paintings give way early to what are effectively genre scenes devoted to washerwomen, ballet dancers or prostitutes. Yet Degas never seems to have had any real sexual interest in women: at the heart of his work is the mystery of an obsessive yet utterly detached observer.

The most familiar incarnation of woman in his work is the ballet dancer; the pictures are reproduced in every suburban ballet studio, evidence of the superficial attention generally accorded to art. For as should be obvious to anyone who actually looks at these paintings, the young dancers are not angelic creatures spontaneously expressing the grace of youth; they are mostly scrawny working-class girls with no natural elegance or refinement who are transfigured momentarily by the power of the choreographer’s art.

The “little rats of the opera”, as they were known, worked extremely hard and only the best could hope to be one day a well-paid etoile — the metaphor of a star had been in use for a couple of generations already. In the meantime, prostitution was common, if not universal; in his illustrations for a story by his friend Ludovic Halevy, Degas shows the ruthless way a mother pimps her own daughter to a lover — fat, old, but rich — whose cash will support the whole family.

But social commentary is incidental to Degas’s work. What really interests him is the involuntary actions and attitudes of the female body: the girl who is not dancing is stretching, leaning forward to adjust a shoulder strap, or twisting to scratch her back. The contrast between the physical, instinctive behaviour of the girls left to their own devices and the grace they achieve under the rule of the ballet master is the subject of pictures such as the tiny but beautiful Foyer de la danse (1872), as well as the slightly later Ecole de danse (c. 1873) from Washington and the closely related La Repetition (c. 1874) from Glasgow.

It is this fascination with the involuntary actions of women, and the physical introversion of their preoccupation with their own bodies, that leads to Degas’s countless drawings and pastels of women bathing and brushing their hair. These are scenes from the lives of prostitutes, and brothels are a subject Degas also treated in dark, gripping monoprints: he makes no moral judgment but evokes the airless boredom and passivity of the wait for a client.

The women washing are not waiting idly for business but preparing themselves for an encounter or bathing after seeing a customer. They are absorbed in their unselfconscious and habitual actions; Degas himself compared these figures to animals cleaning themselves and there is no doubt that what interests him is the spectacle of corporeal movements without the intervention of the mind.

Perhaps the most striking — and unexpected — expression of this interest is in a large sculpted figure, modelled around 1900. This work unquestionably recalls fragmentary figures of the classical period, and Degas is following the example first set by Rodin with The Walking Man (1877-78) of taking the headless and limbless state of many such pieces in museums as a precedent for an incomplete modernist sculpture.

The difference is that here, though cut off at the knees, headless and lacking one arm, the figure still has the other one, with which she twists around to scrub her back. It is a spectacular, even breathtaking example of bathos. And its posture draws our attention to a final and even more fundamental level of Degas’s critique of the female body.

As the figure bends and twists, it cracks at the waist, forming a strong disjunction between the upper and lower parts of the torso. It is a disjunction, once we stop to consider it, that we have seen throughout the exhibition, in prints, paintings and sculptures.

What this break represents is nothing less than a deconstruction of the classical unity of the torso, which we perhaps first see powerfully expressed in the figure in the Louvre that inspired Rilke’s sonnet Archaic Torso of Apollo (1908).

The ideal structure of the classical torso, which essentially ends at the hips, does not strictly apply to the female trunk, in which the hips and thighs are far more prominent; but Degas insists almost brutally on the fact women’s bodies are neither ideal nor whole but divided into an upper part and a lower one, its centre of gravity being the mass composed of the belly, hips and buttocks. He was personally perhaps misogynistic, as is often alleged, but his non-rational picture of the female body also becomes a more general image of our persistent and stubborn animal nature.

Degas: A New Vision

National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, to September 18.