Artist at the crossroads between old and new
Degas: A Passion for Perfection Drawn in Colour: Degas from the Burrell
Artists don’t come much more elusive and paradoxical than Edgar Degas. A patent misanthrope and probable misogynist, the great post-impressionist is best known for his “pretty” images of ballet dancers, and while he liked to present himself as a conservative, who “owed everything to the Old Masters”, his radical cropping of his images – clearly influenced by photography – marks one of the starting points of modernism.
Among various events marking the centenary of the cantankerous French painter’s death, I doubt you’ll get a stronger sense of his many contradictions than in the Fitzwilliam’s A Passion for Perfection. Drawing on its own Degas collection – Britain’s largest – with 60 loans from collections around the world, it begins in rather muted fashion, with the young Degas producing meticulous but formulaic life studies, and tasteful landscapes, before we feel a sudden blast of acrid urban air in the form of two raw, fragmentary, near monochrome and clearly unfinished paintings of women: the Fitzwilliam’s At the Café and Lady with a Parasol from the Courtauld Institute of Art.
Whether or not the two women in the former painting are prostitutes or engaged in an intimate tête-à-tête, as the wall texts speculate, Degas seems less interested in social observation or storytelling than in invoking the physical act of brushwork that appears at once cursory, even rough, and incredibly precise: these, you feel, are exactly the brush marks he was aiming for – no more, no less.
The two-thirds life-size bronze figure Little Dancer Aged Fourteen may be one of the world’s best-known sculptures, but the mixture of haunting vulnerability and unforgiving realism still packs a powerful punch (a cast from the wax original from Norwich’s Sainsbury Centre is shown here).
If the thought of a repressed and solitary man spending endless hours staring at under-age girls makes us uncomfortable, there isn’t a trace of prurience in Degas’s black chalk drawings of dancers, of which there are several superb examples, or in the very rare wax figures, of which we’re shown three: rather a continual, ruthless honing of his preoccupations with balance, poise, rhythm and energy.
While we’re shown a fine array of paintings, pastels and sculpture, it’s really as a draftsman – one of the greatest who ever lived – that Degas shines in this atmospheric exhibition.
The National’s Drawn in Colour centres on a group of 20 large pastels loaned from Glasgow’s Burrell Collection. A more accurate title might have been Painting in Pastel, as Degas builds his shimmering surfaces in layers of sumptuous hatching (lines going in the same direction), creating an effect near indistinguishable from oil paint: from the early, beautifully observed, but relatively dark Preparation for the Class to the later Woman in a Tub, where the resolution of the background into strong, flat areas of colour looks forward to Matisse.
The greatest work here is in fact the National’s own Combing the Hair:a woman and her maid captured in a symphony in reds, oranges and pinks, in which you can feel Degas standing at a pivotal moment between the Old Masters he revered and the modern world he helped create.