Edgar Degas, maleren der betragtede verden og aldrig selv ville ses

Edgar Degas

Photo: Didier Descouens / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Født	19. juli 1834 Paris, France
Død	27. september 1917 (83)
Erhverv	Maler, billedhugger og grafiker

Edgar Degas made his life’s work from watching. The horse at the starting gate, the laundress bent over an ironing table, the ballet student caught in the mirror’s edge — none of them looked back. For more than five decades, he built a visual practice from the systematic observation of bodies in motion, always from the angle of the unseen witness. The irony is that the man who made invisibility his method ended up more famous than almost anyone he ever painted.

He was born on July 19, 1834, in Paris, to a family of quiet wealth. His father, Auguste De Gas, was a Neapolitan banker who had modified the family name; his mother, Célestine Musson, came from a New Orleans Creole family. When Célestine died of complications from childbirth in 1847, Edgar was thirteen, and the loss lodged something formal and guarded in him that no amount of later sociality ever fully dissolved. He enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1855, but the more decisive education came in Italy, where he lived from 1856 to 1859, studying Raphael, Mantegna, and Pontormo with the patient thoroughness of someone who intended to master the past before doing anything with the present.

It was Édouard Manet who redirected him. An encounter in the Louvre in the early 1860s opened a door to modern subject matter that Degas walked through with his own particular agenda. Where Manet painted the boulevard and the café as argument, Degas chose the backstage: the ballet rehearsal room, the jockey weighing in before a race, the woman ironing in an afternoon that seemed to have no end. He chose places that produced spectacle but were themselves unwatched.

The ballet, which would become his most recognized subject, was not chosen for its glamour. Degas wrote that the dance school was useful because it was one of the few places where he could study the female body in sustained movement without the looking becoming strange. The girls of the Paris Opéra corps de ballet were working class; many were there because their families needed the income. He painted their exhaustion as readily as their grace. La Classe de danse (1874), now at the Musée d’Orsay, is less a celebration of ballet than a record of labor — the students scratch their backs, adjust ribbons, and wait for an instruction that keeps not arriving.

At the Sixth Impressionist Exhibition in 1881, Degas showed La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans, a wax figure dressed in a real tutu and a wig of human hair. Critics were disturbed. Some called it hideous; others called it the most truthful sculpture they had ever seen. The model was Marie van Goethem, a fourteen-year-old Belgian student at the Opéra. Degas had observed her with the same steady, impersonal attention he gave every subject. The work’s bronze casts, made posthumously by the Hébrard foundry, now appear in museums across three continents — the only sculpture he ever exhibited publicly, and the one that permanently changed what sculpture was permitted to be.

Then the Dreyfus Affair arrived, and the watching turned inward in the worst possible way. When Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish French army officer, was accused of treason in 1894, Degas aligned himself with the anti-Dreyfus camp with a ferocity that shocked even those who had suspected his privately held prejudices. He screamed slurs at a model who questioned Dreyfus’s guilt and ordered her from the studio. He attended a dinner at the Halévy house in November 1897 — a family with whom he had dined regularly for decades — sat in silence through the meal, and never climbed their stairs again. Camille Pissarro, his old colleague and one of the few Jewish members of the Impressionist circle, reported that Degas had severed contact entirely. The tenderness in the pictures and the hatred outside the studio had coexisted all along; the Affair simply removed the partition between them.

By the early 1900s, his central vision was almost completely gone. The condition, most likely macular degeneration, had been progressing since at least 1870, when he first wrote of trouble with his right eye. “I must learn a blind man’s trade now,” he told a friend as he moved increasingly from painting to sculpture, working with his hands to feel what he could no longer see. He modeled dancers and horses in wax, crouching to run his palms along the model’s joints and then returning to the clay to reconstruct from touch what the eye could no longer supply. The late pastels — bolder, less concerned with surface finish than with the force of the mark — are among his most powerful work.

Degas died on September 27, 1917, in Paris, having outlived most of his contemporaries and nearly all of his friendships. He was 83. The apartment was cluttered; the studio largely closed. In his final years he had taken to walking the Paris streets alone, nearly sightless, a figure who had made seeing his entire argument and was now moving through the city without it. His estate auction in 1918 was the largest sale of a single artist’s work in the history of the Paris art market to that point.

What the body of work continues to argue is this: that looking is not passive. Degas built his entire practice on the fiction that observation is neutral — that the unseen watcher records without affecting. L’Absinthe (1876), which shows two people marooned in a café, not looking at each other, is perhaps the most articulate statement of what detachment costs. The Dreyfus Affair demonstrated the other side of the same disposition: the capacity for sustained, detailed attention that produced the ballet studies was also the capacity for a fixed, immovable hostility. That irresolvable fact is what his work carries now, and it is probably why it remains impossible to look at entirely without discomfort.

Tags: artists, malere, kunstnere, fransk kunst, Impressionisme, Dansetimen

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