Degas: Beyond Impressionism
The Art Institute is touting its big, special-admission Degas show as an exhibit that comes “from a period of his career once shrouded in mystery.” Once, perhaps, but the huge 1988 Degas retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York placed this same period in the context of his whole career. The story that show told was of a painter who after age 50 transformed himself into a kind of proto-abstractionist: Degas’ late pastels have an extraordinary inner light, an intensity of color and form that makes them fully the equal of the fauvist and abstract work of later painters.
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In an era of mad-dog politicians and sundry yahoos, art museums and art historians are perhaps justifiably reluctant to acknowledge eroticism in the art they show. It’s a reluctance that’s hardly new: critics and advocates have long sought to distinguish fine art from pornography by suggesting the former has more elevated aims. And it would be wrong to describe Degas’ work as only erotic: much of its richness comes from its fusion of eroticism with other themes. That I almost wrote “other, larger” themes shows how I too have been brainwashed by centuries of “Western civilization”–is there any real reason why the sexual impulse can’t be as large or high as any other?
Rather than display a body as illusionistically as possible, the way a pornographer does, Degas represents the circumstances of erotic looking, so that one doesn’t have to be attracted to his figures–or to women at all–to appreciate this dimension of his work. Nude Woman Drying Herself reveals an understanding of the way the concealed can be more erotic than what is shown. The woman’s body is mostly turned away from us as she faces an open doorway, the apparent source of the light streaming into the room; while most of her body is in shadow, her left leg and breast and left eyelid catch a bit of light from the door. The eye is led via these glimmers from the moderately sensual back to the unseen front: the mind’s eye, led from darkness to light, imagines the whole nude form.
Degas apparently traced this drawing for the substratum of the pastel Dancers (catalog number 25). Here the figures are dressed in tutus whose textured green flecked with tan and white–a color pattern continued on the wall–adds a level of almost disorganized sensuality. The underlying patterns of the dancers’ limbs still create tension, but the addition of costumes displaces the eroticism of the drawing–the lines of which seem to be leading to the women’s crotches–to the texture of the pastels and the paper. The continuation of the costumes’ color patterns onto the wall and floor also disperses attention from the figures to the whole image.
