This retrospective exhibition of the work of Edgar Degas (1834–1917), curated by Degas specialist Henri Loyrette, offers a new examination of this celebrated French artist’s rich, complex and abundant career, which spanned the entire second half of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth.

While the Impressionism of Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro and Alfred Sisley manifested the charm of working en plein air (out of doors), Degas (who called himself a Realist rather than an Impressionist) preferred to work in the studio and to study his models by artificial light. He was drawn to the effects brought about by lamplight, oil lamps and stage footlights rather than those of the sun and clouds. His Impressionist colleagues were primarily – and often solely – painters, but Degas was first and foremost a draughtsman, working with pencil, chalk, charcoal, gouache, watercolour and pastel. He reinvented the monotype which, along with printmaking and later photography, permitted him to make admirable bodies of work in black and white. In the 1890s, however, he gave himself over to what he called ‘an orgy of colour’. He railed against those who set up their easels out of doors and yet created, in 1869 and again in around 1892, an incomparable group of landscape compositions.

Degas’s art can be appreciated anew today as open-ended, ‘a work in progress’, rather than the sum of individual and isolated works. This is the distinctive genius of Degas, which makes him both a precursor of modern art in the twentieth century and particularly relevant today. Degas: A New Vision examines how in Degas’s mature years he worked and reworked compositions in a fluid manner that made the process of making his art as valid a subject as narratives and observations of contemporary life had been earlier in his career.

Prologue

From his earliest days as an artist, Edgar Degas (1834–1917) experimented with a wide range of media. In the 1860s he sought to reconcile the teachings of both Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Eugène Delacroix to reinvent history painting and to illuminate, in the words of his art critic friend Edmond Duranty, ‘the fire of contemporary life’. Degas was preoccupied with subjects drawn from everyday life before these were taken up by Édouard Manet: horseracing, dance classes, laundry workers, the elegant night-life of the café-concert, and prostitution. He sought to add meaning to his portraits by placing his sitters in settings that indicated their professions and outlooks.

At the start of the 1860s Degas was still focused on creating elaborate and striking compositions destined for display at the Paris Salon in order to promote his career. However, his output soon became more open, fluid and continuous, a series of inexhaustible variations upon a single theme or gesture of the body. He did not find new horizons in exotic foreign travel, but rather through an ever deeper exploration of a few chosen motifs. His continual dissatisfaction or, as he put it, ‘a proper idea, not of what you are doing now but of what you may do one day’, drove him ceaselessly onwards. He measured his own progress in terms of new formats, technical innovation and experimentation, simplification of form and the rejection – indeed the impossibility – of what he called ‘exercises in precision’.

Beginnings

Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas belonged to an extended family that had branches in Italy and the United States, as well as France. His French-Italian father, Auguste, and Creole-American mother, Célestine, married in Paris in 1832 and Edgar was born two years later. Degas’s father was a keen musician, as well as a collector of eighteenth-century French art, who maintained friendships with a number of serious art collectors; consequently the young Degas, who spoke both French and Italian fluently, was raised in an atmosphere of cultural and intellectual aspiration. In 1847 Célestine died at the age of thirty-two, when Edgar was thirteen years old. The eldest child, he had two younger brothers, Achille and René, and two younger sisters, Thérèse and Marguerite.

When Edgar was eleven he was enrolled in the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, a school for children of the upwardly mobile professional classes. There he learned Ancient Greek and Latin and also mastered the classics of French literature. On weekends his father regularly took the teenage Degas to visit distinguished private art collections across Paris. Despite his father’s wishes that he study law, after graduating Degas was allowed to take private art lessons and in April 1855 he enrolled in formal classes at the École des Beaux-Arts (although he never completed his studies there). An introduction to the revered artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres at this time had a formative influence upon his commitment to both drawing and portraiture. Aside from himself, Degas’s first models were his siblings and other family members.

Italy

Abandoning both his legal and art studies in Paris, Degas left for Italy in the summer of 1856, at the age of twenty-two. His father, Auguste, had agreed to fund an extended period of travel and study, albeit on a strict budget. Stopping first in Naples, Degas stayed with his paternal grandfather, Hilaire, and renewed acquaintance with his first cousins Alfredo and Adelchi Morbilli (sons of his father’s sister Rose; their elder brother, Edmondo, would later marry Degas’s sister Thérèse). While Degas’s father had adopted the French version of the family surname, De Gas, the Italian side of the family spelled their name Degas. Edgar himself would later adopt this Italian spelling of his surname.

Degas had left the École des Beaux-Arts without completing his studies and never applied for the state-sponsored Prix de Rome, whose winners were funded to travel and work in Rome for three years. Despite this, he participated in activities at the Académie de France’s residence there, the Villa Medici, welcomed by its liberal director Jean-Victor Schnetz. Under Schnetz’s influence Degas undertook sensitive studies of some of Rome’s local residents, alongside his ceaseless copying after classical sculpture and the Old Masters. He now formed friendships with the professional painter and engraver Joseph Tourny, and with another student eight years his senior, Gustave Moreau. Moreau is credited with introducing the young Degas both to new schools of art (the Venetian colourists, and Eugène Delacroix, for example) and to experimental uses of watercolour, distemper and pastel.

History painting

Degas returned to Paris in early 1859, and soon moved into a new Paris studio at 13 rue de Laval in the 9th arrondissement. He continued to copy after Old Master paintings in the Louvre, while developing a number of history paintings of a scale and subject suitable for submission to the annual Salon, which then still provided the major exhibiting opportunity for emerging artists. Stories from the Old Testament and scenes from daily life in ancient Greece and of conflict in the Middle Ages would be worked upon until early 1865, when his highly idiosyncratic Scene of war in the Middle Ages, 1865, became his first painting to be accepted for display at the Paris Salon, where it was largely ignored.

After 1865, however, Degas completely abandoned history painting. No doubt his reasons were partly strategic; he must have thought that, since even so radical a version of history painting had been overlooked, he might be better received if he submitted portraits or scenes of modern life to subsequent Salons, as indeed he did. Above all, he had by now understood what he continued to affirm throughout his life: that one could, with the right treatment of the everyday, give it the breadth and ambition of history. He did not so much deny the importance of the subject as claim that there were no insignificant subjects; the rest was the business of art.

The Bellelli family

In 1858–59, during his Italian sojourn, Degas stayed in Florence for nine months with his aunt Laure and her husband, Baron Gennaro Bellelli. There he embarked on the largest painting he would ever create – a monumental portrait of Laure, Gennaro and their daughters, Giovanna and Giulia. A study of marital discontent presented on the scale of a history painting, Family portrait (Portrait de famille), also called The Bellelli family, reflected Degas’s recent study of the dignified sitters in the Flemish master Anthony van Dyck’s early seventeenth-century portraits, which he had seen in Genoa. He worked on this painting continuously after his return to Paris, completing a final version of it for the Paris Salon of 1867. Alive to the unhappy marital dynamics between Laure and her husband, a political exile from Naples, Degas showed his morose relatives in their rented apartment, physically separated from one another by items of furniture and Giovanna (on the left) and Giulia. Although expecting her third child, Laure Bellelli (la Baronne) stands proud and aloof, in full mourning for her recently deceased father (Degas’s grandfather) Hilaire Degas, whose portrait hangs on the wall behind her. Meanwhile, her husband, conspicuously not in mourning, sits in comfort by the fire. Adults and children are compressed into a shallow plane, an airless, static vacuum. The uneasy ambience is accentuated by Giulia’s absent leg and the family dog, shown without its head, in the right foreground.

Portraiture: 1860s and 1870s

In 1862, while copying paintings by Old Masters in the Louvre, Degas made the acquaintance of Édouard Manet. Although Manet was a regular exhibitor at the Paris Salon, he was recognised nonetheless by many younger artists as a leading opponent of the Salon’s commitment to outmoded and archaic subject matter and conservative painting styles. Manet seemed to embody the progressive motto of il faut être de son temps (being true to one’s time) that was being championed by devotees of Realism in contemporary painting, and Degas also adopted this commitment to contemporary subjects depicted in a Realist manner.

A network of artistic and musical friendships now developed for Degas against the backdrop of the 9th arrondissement’s musical and performance venues, cafes and artists’ ateliers. The Café Guerbois was a regular haunt. Here Degas joined in artistic and literary discussions with Manet and a group of young fellow artists opposed to the traditional Salon – Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, Camille Pissarro and Frédéric Bazille – writers and poets such as Émile Zola and Théodore de Banville, the photographer Félix Nadar and critics Edmond Duranty and Théodore Duret. Musical friendships were established in this period with Désiré Dihau, a bassoon player with the Paris Opéra, and his pianist sister Marie Dihau; and Lorenzo Pagans, a Catalan composer, guitar player and former tenor with the Paris Opéra who performed frequently at musical evenings organised by Degas’s father and the Manets. In the 1860s and 1870s Degas undertook engaging portraits of artist and musician friends from these circles.

Landscapes: 1860s

Degas always disagreed with the importance assigned to landscape by the Impressionists, and their exaltation of painting in the open air – sur le motif. Along with the critic Charles Baudelaire, Degas deemed his generation too ‘herbivorous’ and avoided open-air painting due to the weakness of his eyes and their susceptibility to bright light. Above all, he rejected an instinctual form of painting constrained by the rendering of ‘impressions’. He argued that if one could take notes on nature – tracing the overall lines of a landscape, accompanying them with colour indications, specifying a few morphological and botanical details – it was in the isolation of the studio, working from memory, decanting one’s sensations and calling upon one’s imagination that the painting was at last resolved.

In the second half of the 1860s Degas laid out his position. The racing scenes and a series of pastel landscapes he created in 1869 clearly defined the role that landscape would thereafter play in his work; however, this development was only reached after a survey of all the various possibilities, some of which are displayed here. The singular (and unfinished) Dead fox in the undergrowth, 1861–64, and Horses in a meadow, 1871, are unique in Degas’s corpus. In 1869 the artist created the first of three series of landscapes, comprising more than forty pastels. It would be twenty years before he returned to the genre, in 1890–92, and again in 1896–98.

Racecourses: 1860s

Horseracing was Degas’s first recurrent modern subject, and preceded his dance classes and opera scenes. In 1861 Degas visited Ménil-Hubert in the Normandy countryside, the family estate of his old school friend Paul Valpinçon, situated near to the Haras-le-Pin stud and the Argentan racecourse. The recreational sports of horseracing and the steeplechase now offered him scope for exploring contemporary narrative painting. In pre-mechanised Europe, horses were as ubiquitous as the car is today. They were an essential part of life, whether for work or pleasure, and Degas was accordingly fascinated by these magnificent creatures. They feature in his earliest sketchbooks when he carefully copied equestrian subjects after the Parthenon frieze sculptures and the Italian Old Masters Paolo Uccello and Benozzo Gozzoli; and he continuously drew, painted and sculpted horses until his death.

Degas’s approach to depicting horses embodies his lifelong methodology. He studied and copied how they were represented by specialist animalier artists, as well as by the Old Masters, and he spent many hours observing and examining them. How he portrayed horses changed over time and his earliest works reveal a slightly tentative and clichéd manner as he struggled for perfection. As his art evolved, his images of horses became more innovative and remarkable: he attained great precision in their appearance yet the rendering remained tactile and lively. He also perfectly captured the physical relationship between rider and horse through all the different poses they struck, whether at rest or in full flight. Few artists have reproduced the grace, power and elegance of horses as well as Degas.

First ballet works: 1870s

While the friendships he established in the 1860s with musicians such as Désiré Dihau, a bassoon player with the Paris Opéra, brought Degas into the orbit of ballet performances in the French capital, the full extent of his access to this world prior to the mid 1880s remains unknown. This may explain why his many depictions of dancers practising backstage in rehearsal rooms in the 1870s were his own studio inventions rather than accurate depictions of the Opéra’s foyers de la danse. Degas’s favourite theatrical venues – the Opéra in the rue le Peletier that was destroyed by fire in October 1873 and its replacement, the Palais Garnier, which opened in 1875 – were both located in the 9th arrondissement, close to his studio.

Degas exhibited ballet compositions at the ‘impressionist’ group exhibitions from 1874 onwards, all the while resisting the label, arguing that his own art was Realist and meticulously crafted in the studio instead of spontaneously created before nature. When the Galeries Durand-Ruel began acquiring Degas’s paintings in 1872, the artist’s first sales at this time were of ballet subjects. Unlike the romantic perspective through which these scenes are viewed today, Degas’s contemporaries recognised in them a rejection of the surface glamour of ballet’s front of house in favour of a serious study of the gritty reality of life backstage. There, junior impoverished dancers jostled for attention from their trainers, all too frequently prostituting themselves on the side so they could afford to stay in competition for coveted stardom.

New Orleans

In October 1872 Degas travelled to New Orleans in the United States, where he stayed for five months with his late mother’s brother Michel Musson and the extended Musson family. The artist’s younger brothers René and Achille had already relocated there, and had opened a wine import business financed by the Parisian Degas family’s bank. During his stay in Louisiana, Degas painted A cotton office in New Orleans, 1873, displayed here, which reflected his observations of the industry central to that city.

This now celebrated painting, which became the first work by Degas to enter a public collection when acquired by Pau’s Musée des Beaux-Arts in 1878, depicts Michel Musson in the foreground sampling cotton fibre in the office of his cotton export business. René and Achille De Gas appear as relaxed visitors – René reading a newspaper and Achille casually observing the other men at work – in this complex group portrait of fourteen men, which has echoes of the artist’s love of seventeenth-century Dutch guild portraits (such as Rembrandt’s Syndics of the Draper’s Guild, 1662, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam). A cotton office in New Orleans was the prototype for many of Degas’s works of the 1870s and 1880s: framing that cuts to the heart of the subject and slices through men and objects alike; a de-centred composition viewed from slightly overhead, with a steep, diagonal perspective; a depth of field that creates close-ups while miniaturising anything farther off; and contrasts provided by light sources and, more particularly, by the frequently reproduced backlighting effect.

Nudes: 1870s

In 1875 Degas returned to etching, exploring its rich possibilities. For the next five years he relentlessly sought mastery of this process, which he had practised relatively little until that time. He combined a taste for bricolage (tinkering) with a love of the ‘fine proof’, and probably embraced the commercial aspect of this art more than has been acknowledged because he was then in financial difficulties. His choice of the female nude as a principal subject may also have been related to his wish to create a ‘saleable’ product. From this point on, working in black and white became the obsession of his life.

By July 1876 – when Degas had become, in the words of his printmaker friend Marcellin Desboutin, ‘a plate of zinc or copper blacked up in printing ink’ – he had fully developed the monotype, creating some of his most beautiful works in this technique. To realise a ‘drawing made in thick ink then printed’ – he preferred this description to the term ‘monotype’ – Degas used two methods: ‘dark background’, in which some of the ink with which the metal plate had earlier been covered was removed with the aid of a cloth, and ‘light background’, which involved drawing directly onto a blank plate with the aid of a paintbrush and printer’s ink. The tub, 1876–77, is an example of a dark monotype, while Getting dressed, 1880–85, employs the light background technique.

Cafés-concerts: 1870s

The time that Degas spent overseas in New Orleans made him surprisingly nostalgic for everything he had left behind in Paris. The simple reason he gave was that ‘One loves and gives art only to the things to which one is accustomed’. Although delighted by the new sights and sensations he experienced in New Orleans, he felt that ‘new things capture your fancy and bore you by turns’. With these words, Degas expressed what would become his credo for the rest of his career.

After this time Degas refused invitations to travel to exotic locales and put aside the search for new subjects, focusing instead on the same themes: dancers, jockeys, women in the bath. The novelty of what he had discovered in America, though it gave rise to important works, also led him soon afterwards to retreat into himself, seeking inspiration in introspection. For Degas the exotic could be found perfectly well at home, especially in the new evening venues of 1870s Paris, the cafés-concerts. He delighted in exploring the tension and psychological preparation that lay behind the surface glamour of stage performances conducted within an artificial other-reality.

Ballet and theatre: 1870s and 1880s

In the 1870s Degas wrote to a collector friend, Albert Hecht: ‘Have you the powerto get the Opéra to give me a pass for the day of the dance examination? … I have done so many of these dance examinations without having seen them that I am a little ashamed of it’. From the records of the Opéra archives it seems that Degas only obtained a formal backstage pass for the premises in 1885. Ironically, by this time he had already created his series of monotypes based on La Famille Cardinal (The Cardinal Family) (1883), the bestselling novel by his school friend Ludovic Halévy which examined illicit liaisons at the Opéra, where young, poorly paid trainee dancers often became sexual prey for wealthy Parisian gentlemen. Two of these monotypes, showing abonnés (subscribers with backstage access) hovering in corridors and at dressing-room doors, are displayed here.

Between 1885 and 1892 records show that Degas attended the Opéra on 117 evenings. In the first flush of joy at receiving his access pass, he visited the Opéra fifty-four times in 1885 alone. However, as much as Degas loved French grand opera – its music, its scale, the obligatory ballet and the grandiose spectacle it provided – his attendance tapered off when its musical repertoire changed. After the Paris Opéra in the early 1890s abandoned an entire generation of composers, such as Gioachino Antonio Rossini and Giacomo Meyerbeer, and turned its attention to Richard Wagner, Degas never set foot there again.

Working women: 1870s and 1880s

From the 1870s Degas became addicted to the exploration of motifs depicting repetitive labour or physical activity. His numerous depictions of laundresses seen through the windows of their premises reflect an awareness of the monotony brought about by the mechanisation of life and work created by industrial modernisation. They also display a respect for the hard physical labour represented, coupled with an unsettling voyeurism imparted by their often elevated viewpoint. With his studies of dancers, laundresses, café-concert singers and prostitutes, Degas was seen in this period as the champion of what has been called ‘scientific realism’. His friend the art critic Edmond Duranty had argued in 1867 that artists should consider applying a ‘physiognomic science’ to their work: ‘Determine whether people whose face has some analogy with that of animals whose customs and instincts are well known share some relationship with that animal in respect of their own tendencies’.

As with his portraits of café-concert singers, Degas’s frank studies of working women frequently give them a rodent-like profile, seeming to indicate that he drew inspiration from Charles Darwin’s The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), first translated into French in 1874. Degas’s dancers invariably have the ‘plebeian snout’ that he later celebrated in one of his sonnets: ‘singers onstage stretch out mitts that move like those of Meissen grotesques [in the Monkey Orchestra]’. Duranty also encouraged artists to ‘establish the physiognomic relationship between people exercising the same trade’, a concept that Degas embraced when studying the relationships between women engaged in shared physical labour.

Brothel scenes: 1870s

From 1876 Degas undertook monotype studies of sex workers in Parisian brothels. While the theme was also common in contemporary French literature, prostitution in Degas’s work entirely lacks the lascivious perspective brought to the subject by many French writers of the late nineteenth century. The monotype, with its dark masses and tonal contrasts, eliminates precision and crudity of detail, a certain distance being enforced by the medium itself. The brothel where Degas undertook these studies was a fairly ordinary neighbourhood business; luxurious – with big mirrors, chandeliers, thick carpet and buttoned upholstery – but lacking the opulent exoticism of more luxury establishments. His prostitutes are painted from the same model, virtually identical in features and style, systematically denuded or wearing only accessories, such as black stockings or transparent cami-knickers, that highlight their bodies.

Degas’s observations tend to focus on the mundane drudgery experienced by prostitutes waiting between clients rather than on their sexual acts, although by their very nature these scenes have a certain illicit voyeurism. His sex workers are just that – workers – having the same status in Degas’s art as his dancers, theatre performers, laundresses and jockeys. The brothel client is as furtive as the Opéra season – ticket holder he depicted earlier – an intruder out of place in this feminine universe, carefully sized up and incited but protected by his dark suit, hat and cane, incongruous amid the nudity.

Sculpture

Although Degas exhibited only one sculpture during his lifetime, The little fourteen-year-old dancer, he worked in this medium in privacy in his studio from the 1860s until the 1910s. His primary subjects were thoroughbred racehorses, female dancers and women at their toilette, and he modelled his sculptures in wax, over steel wire and cork armatures. Never satisfied, he made, destroyed and remade them repeatedly. As Degas’s eyesight deteriorated in his later years, making three-dimensional figures fulfilled a physical and emotional need that transcended any desire to perfect a finished object; he allegedly said that sculpture was ‘a blind man’s trade’.

After Degas’s death in 1917, some 150 wax sculptures were found in his studio, some broken but many intact. His heirs subsequently authorised the casting in bronze, by the Adrien-A. Hébrard Foundry, Paris, and their Milanese master craftsman Albino Palazzolo, of seventy-four of the most intact of Degas’s sculptures. Palazzolo first made a flexible gelatin mould of each of the wax sculptures, intricately detailed to the point of capturing the artist’s fingerprints on the wax originals. From this he made a duplicate wax model of each sculpture, saving unharmed Degas’s original wax models; he next used the duplicate to make, by the cire perdue or ‘lost wax’ method of casting, the bronzes you see here. While many of Degas’s original wax sculptures still survive, they are too fragile to travel. These bronzes allow wider audiences today to engage with some of the most beautiful sculptures of the nineteenth century.

The Woman in Movement

From 1875 pastel became one of Degas’s favourite techniques. Gustave Moreau had introduced him to this medium during their time together in Italy during the late 1850s, and the increasing interest in pastel in artistic circles during the 1870s influenced Degas’s choice to explore its potential. At the eighth and last ‘impressionist’ group exhibition in 1886 Degas exhibited a suite of pastel studies of women bathing that challenged conventional notions of feminine beauty in their depiction of non-idealised jolie-laide (unconventionally beautiful) models. George Moore wrote tellingly of these nudes: ‘The effect is prodigious. Degas has done what Baudelaire did – he has invented un frisson nouveau (a new sensation)’.

Because intimate access to female ablutions was rarely experienced by husbands in bourgeois married life at the time, it was assumed by critics and audiences that Degas’s female nudes were performing their toilettes in a brothel setting. Their close observation of undressed women engaged in private acts of washing and drying themselves led Degas’s ongoing status as a bachelor to become a topic of speculation in both the art world and wider social circles. Far from being a respectable state, in Degas’s day bachelorhood was considered to be a social evil and a sign of degeneracy, a condition that challenged the status quo of both Second Empire and Third Republic family values. Degas’s refusal to marry, as well as his apparent lack of sexual interest in women – despite his obsession with observing the naked female form – inevitably led to unfounded notions that he was a misogynist.

landscapes

In 1889 Degas travelled through Spain with an Italian painter friend Giovanni Boldini, and the following year he journeyed by tilbury coach through the French countryside with the sculptor Albert Bartholomé. While travelling with Bartholomé, Degas stayed at Diénay, Burgundy, with a friend who had an etching press. This inspired him to make his first colour monotypes, recording on the plate the landscapes glimpsed from the tilbury, which Bartholomé had steered. Created thus from memory, these landscapes offered what has been aptly described as ‘optical enrichment’, due to Degas’s frequent layering of vivid pastel hues over coloured monotype underlays. In September 1892, Degas astonished his good friend Ludovic Halévy and his family by announcing that the ‘fruits of my journeys this summer’ had been ‘twenty-one landscapes’. As he put it: ‘I stood at the doors of the coaches and I looked around vaguely. That gave me the idea to do the landscapes’. These monotypes were, he added, ‘imaginary landscapes’.

In the autumn of 1892, and again in October 1894, he exhibited twenty or so of these monotype and pastel landscapes at Paul Durand-Ruel’s gallery in Paris. The critic Gustave Geffroy compared them at the time to ‘precious sapphires in velvet jewellery boxes’. In 1898 Degas made a final foray into landscape, working in Saint-Valéry-sur-Somme, where his brother René’s family spent their summers. These last landscapes possess Gauguin-like qualities, confirming for him that there was no need to travel to exotic locales such as Polynesia when the French provinces provided such picturesque resources.

racecourses

Constructed as part of the redevelopment of Paris under Emperor Napoléon III, Longchamp Racecourse opened to great fanfare in 1857. Nestled in the huge expanse of the Bois du Boulogne, it sits between bends in the River Seine to the west of the city. Around twenty years later the Auteuil Hippodrome, designed for steeplechase, also opened in the same parkland area and was accessible via one of Paris’s grand boulevards. It was said that in the 1890s the roar of the racing crowds could be heard beneath the Eiffel Tower. Under imperial patronage, the popularity of racing with the upper and middle classes was immense and, much like the Melbourne Spring Racing Carnival, people flocked to the races to see and be seen.

Artists were naturally drawn to this colourful spectacle, and from the 1860s Degas as well as Édouard Manet (and later Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec) created iconic images of the races and racegoers. Always experimental, Degas departed from the usual approach typical of sporting artists and his friendly rival, Manet. Traditionally, racing was portrayed from the viewpoint of the spectator, with artists making stylised scenes of massed galloping horses seen from across the fence; Degas, however, immersed the viewer at the heart of the action. He rarely showed the race itself, preferring the tension inherent in the rituals and waiting for the starter’s flag to fall.

women at their toilettes

In the mid 1890s Degas deliberately turned his back on the realism to which he had aspired in earlier years. Instead he made constant variations on a small number of themes: dancers, nudes and horses; a few props, such as a bathtub, a bench, an unmade bed, a laundry; a few poses and a few movements. Capturing motion, experimenting in colour and finding new methods of expression preoccupied the artist in his final years.

While his subject matter contracted, Degas became ever more radical in terms of his experimentation with media and techniques. He now dissolved colours in liquid solvents, spreading them with the paintbrush, brush or stump, tempering them with inking pad or sponge, and making incisions with a knife or needle that engraved the surface and made it stand up in miniature relief. He hated smooth surfaces and sometimes burnt the top layer of his compositions to create holes, lumps and craters, subsequently filling in this artificially rugged platform with floods of new pastel. In order to be sure that the successive layers would completely adhere, drastic methods were adopted. One visitor to Degas’s studio in these later years recalled seeing him place a work in pastel on the ground, cover it with a piece of card and then stomp upon it to ‘force the pastel into the medium, so that it formed a more compact matter.

portraits

In the late 1890s and early 1900s Degas increasingly complained to friends about his deteriorating eyesight. This, along with the deaths of numerous old friends and family members, brought distress to his later years, as did the outbreak of the Dreyfus Affair. A political scandal involving a Jewish army officer falsely accused of espionage by corrupt military officials, the Dreyfus Affair polarised French society in the late 1890s, dividing families and ruining friendships over issues of anti-Semitism and support for or opposition to military, religious and political reform. An ex-soldier and pro-military, Degas sided with the anti-dreyfusard camp, ultimately severing his lifelong friendship with his school friend Ludovic Halévy.

Other friendships now became vital for the ageing artist. He enjoyed his closeness to Alexis and Louis, the sons of Henri Rouart, another fellow pupil from Degas’s youthful days at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, and their wives and families, telling Alexis Rouart in December 1904, ‘It is true, my dear friend, you put it well, you are all my family’. The frustration of Degas’s struggle with his eyesight problems can be detected in his nonetheless expressive drawings of the younger Rouarts. That Degas would attempt to undertake portraiture at a time when his sight was so compromised reflects his comfortable relationship with the Rouarts. As he also wrote to Alexis at this time: ‘I am impatient for the family Rouart to be back in Paris, because I am alone and abandoned’.

photography

Photography was a new medium to which Degas devoted himself from the mid 1890s onwards. He was enamoured in particular by the possibilities photography provided for capturing indoor illumination at night and Degas took particular care to position lamps and reflectors in the search for an almost spiritual quality. The medium’s often ghostly imperfections encourage unexpectedly Symbolist readings at times. Surviving accounts of his photographic sessions indicate that he approached his photographs with the same authorial precision that he brought to all his art forms, even to the point of physically manipulating his sitters’ heads and limbs; however, his desire for perfection was always competing with his innate passion for experimentation.

Photography played an important part in the later years of Degas’s close friendship with the Halévy family. Ludovic Halévy had been a friend since their school days together at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in the 1840s. His son Daniel’s journal provides vivid accounts of the artist stage-managing photographic sessions after dinner at the Halévys in 1895, seeking effects that were ‘difficult – the atmosphere of lamps or moonlight’. Leaves from the Halévy family photo album are displayed here, containing small photographic prints that record these intimate evenings. Degas frequently marked-up such small prints, indicating how he would like them cropped or developed in a lighter or darker manner. A local photographic materials salesman in the 9th arrondissement, Guillaume Tasset, was then tasked with making these enlargements and changes, creating the large-format ‘exhibition’ photographs that are also displayed here.

dancers

Degas’s paintings and pastels of the 1890s and 1900s display an ever-increasing intensity of colour, what he in fact called ‘orgies of colour’. In his late works, Degas unhesitatingly applied apple green, fluorescent pink or canary yellow to his studies of dancers, with their progressively sketchier faces and in their polychrome tutus, who endlessly rehearse a limited repertory of movements: adjusting an epaulette, scratching their backs or fluffing up their underskirts. Sometimes the black and white of a large sheet drawn in charcoal is highlighted with a single note of brilliant colour; sometimes a lively dominant colour stands out on the rich texture of a pastel, its successive layers placed and meticulously fixed one after another, striped and hatched strokes overlapping and juxtaposed. The support is generally tracing paper – or several pieces of tracing paper placed end to end – mounted by a professional onto a more rigid surface.

Degas very rarely exhibited in these later years, keeping the majority of his work private. After 1890 only around 150 works – a little more than a quarter of his output – were bought and sold during his lifetime; the rest were to remain buried in his studio until his death, alongside a substantial portion of earlier works. These final, iridescent dancers remind us that Degas spent a life working and researching his art with a single-minded desire to bring form to what was formless in the world and express his constantly evolving vision of that world.