| AUSTRALIAN
PHOTOGRAPHY MAGAZINE (July/August 1999) EDGAR
DEGAS: As a visual art form that often employs precision, form and concentration, photography is not unique in its conception and path to presenting a “masterpiece”. Some photographers commence their artistic adventures as painters using a brush instead of a camera. It is not surprising to find this application to which many photographers have followed in order to fulfil their creative endeavours. One surprise photographer however, was 19th Century French Impressionist painter Edgar Degas who applied his genius to photography late in his career. One of the most revered and revolutionary painters, Degas became world renowned for his scenes of ballet dancers, race horses at Longchamps and other images of Parisian life. After completing the majority of his paintings and experimenting with pastel and monotype, Degas briefly focused his agile intellect on photography. By this time Degas was 61 years old, thus revealing the artist’s surprising achievement in a medium in which he has gone largely unrecognised. In 1895 Degas became intrigued by the latest technical innovations and in a burst of creative energy that lasted less than five years, threw himself into photography for a short but intense period. Creating a body of photographs of which fewer then 50 survived, each one is full of mystery and also an experiment in how an artist sees photographically. In a recent exhibition high up in the Los Angeles hills at The J Paul Getty Museum, Degas’s photographic portraits and self-portraits assembled together for the first time outside of France. Featuring loans from institutions and private collectors in the United States and France, this travelling exhibition includes approximately 40 rare negatives and original photographs, as well as a small number of related pastels, monotypes, and oil paintings. Anyone familiar with Degas’s paintings, drawings and prints might expect his photographs to be instantaneous slices of life, captured with one of the new handheld cameras that would invite spontaneity. Instead, Degas insisted on the photographer’s traditional paraphernalia, using a large, tripod-mounted camera that exposed glass-plate negatives as large as five-by-seven inches, as he was not interested in snapshots. Introduced to photography by the son of his old friends Ludovic and Louise Halévy, Degas bought an Eastman Kodak No. 1 and used it with the same energy he put into everything he did. These photographs remind the viewer how Degas’s vision extends across all media, his work in one medium informing another. The photographs range in subject from portraits to dancers to street scenes and landscapes; they include several remarkable nudes and brilliantly coloured glass-plate negatives. The photographs offer a rare opportunity to see how Degas explored photography both as a form of preparatory drawing and as a process of discovery that resulted in works of art in their own right. Exactly why Degas took up photography remains unknown, however it is clear that photography provided a new pair of eyes during his later life. In Louise Halévy Reading to Degas, an enlargement from a contact print done around 1895, Degas conveys unusual intimacy. It shows a vulnerable man’s dependence upon a friend in reading the newspaper at a time when his eyesight was failing. Photographs were also for Degas a powerful tool of memory to recall his loved ones. The illness and death of his adored sister, Marguerite, in 1895 and his brother Achille in 1893 seem to have played a significant role in Degas’s photographic desires. Degas sensed a powerful spiritual resonance in photographs of his loved ones, and the activity of photographing bound him closely to his extended family – the Halévy’s – who embraced him in his time of grief. With their single source of light, the figures emerge from a dark ground like those found in many of Degas’s monotypes and drawings. Degas did his picture taking at night, in part because his daylight hours were taken up with studio painting, and in part because his principal aim was to use the photographic images to explore. As Degas writes in 1905 “Daylight is too easy. What I want is difficult – the atmosphere of lamps or moonlight. Oh, photography, that was a great passion! I bothered all my friends; I made some nice things, didn’t I?… Here’s what happened: My blacks were pushed too far and my whites not enough, so that they both were simplified, as in the Old Masters.” Degas often illuminated his subjects with a single bright light source. The figures seem to emerge from darkness. In a series of individual portraits he made of the Halévy’s, each sitter is pictured in the same armchair in their home under this Rembrandtesque light. They are seen in original contact prints (about 3 x 4 inches) and in enlargements. Altogether, these images show the artist’s picture-making process and reveal Degas’ manipulations of space, scale focus and emotional effect. Degas took his camera to social events, and making photographs of his friends and family became a kind of after-dinner amusement. The ‘pleasure’ part of the evening over, Degas would become dictatorial, ordering that a lamp be brought into the drawing room and that anyone not posing should leave. The ‘business’ part of the evening got underway. Degas’s friend Daniel Halévy’s wrote “If you asked him over for the evening, you know what you’re letting yourself in for: two hours of military obedience. Degas would scurry from one corner of the drawing room to the other with an expression of supreme happiness. He moved lamps, changed the reflectors, and tried to light their legs by putting a lamp on the floor. They held the pose for two minutes – and so it went. Degas “always looking happy”, leaving that evening “surrounded by three laughing girls, shouldering his camera, as proud as a child carrying a rifle.” At one time or another guests pictured included famed painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, poet Stéphane Mallarmé, his friends the Halévy's, Degas himself and his brother René posed in front of his lens, feigning nonchalance in clever tableaux. Writes dinner party host Julie Manet, “M. Degas no longer thinks of anything but photography…. He invited us all to have dinner at his house next week. He will make a photograph of us in the light, except that we have to hold the pose for three minutes; he wanted to see if we were good models and posed M. Renoir, who began to laugh.” His carefully positioned models would have to keep still for long periods of time in an eerie, sometimes inscrutable space that gives them a phantomlike presence. Two themes to which Degas returned on several occasions is that of a woman putting on her stockings or a contorted female bather. In the 1896 photograph After the Bath, Woman Drying her Back, Degas’s nude study shows the model twisting dramatically on the back of a chair. The only photograph known directly to form the basis for a painting, it shows Degas’s fluid movement between various media helping him to fully capture what his imagination saw. In discovering photography, Degas proved able to harness this useful tool to finally perfect his paintings of difficult contortionist’s poses. “I saw [Degas] with a model, trying to pose her in the movement of drying herself while leaning on the high padded back of a chair covered with a bathrobe. This movement is complicated. The woman being shown from the back, you see her shoulder blades, but the right shoulder, bearing the weight of the body, takes a most unexpected shape, which suggests some kind of acrobatic activity of violent effort” comments artist Georges Jeanniot. Because Degas’s photographs were little known or valued at the time of his death, other such figure studies may have been discarded or destroyed. It is tantalising to imagine further examples linked thematically or compositionally to known pastels or paintings. It seems unlikely that Degas made only the two nudes and three dance photographic studies existing in this exhibition, though no others have been convincingly identified. In this exhibition, the three richly coloured original glass-plate negatives of his famous dancers, are among Degas’s most startling photographs, not only because of their unusual appearance but also because they treat a theme central to his art with a remarkable mystery and intimacy. Flush with red and orange hues, they contain the partially solarised forms of ballet dancers that served as models for a small statuette and dozens of drawings and pastels. The exquisite pose of the dancer adjusting her shoulder straps (taken in late 1895 or 1896) anticipates that of one of his sculptures which was modelled in wax and posthumously cast in bronze in 1920. These negatives, for which no positive prints exist from Degas’s lifetime, have a special allure. Their vivid colouration may be the result of a post-development procedure: chemical intensification of an underexposed or weakly developed negative or they may be the result of chemical reduction of an over-exposed or overdeveloped negative. The reproduction show how Degas’s original appears when reversed from negative to positive, a form in which Degas apparently never saw them. These photographers were never exhibited in his lifetime, and today Degas’s photographs remain all but unknown. Weston Naef, the Museum’s Curator of Photographs comments “The photographs that so excited the artist himself were bold experiments that he shared with a small circle of friends and fellow artists. The images are at times highly personal, sometimes theatrical, and occasionally Symbolist in their meanings. They reveal his full command of a new form of visual expression.” Born of French and Italian ancestry (1834-1917), Degas abandoned law studies in 1855 to pursue art. Leaving Paris for Italy in the next year, he continued his artistic education by copying works from the school of Leonardo da Vinci. After returning to Paris in 1861, through the painter Édouard Manet he met the group that would be known as the Impressionists, and became one of the firsts among them to achieve recognition. Degas became interested in photographs as a form of representation in the early 1860s, three decades before he gave any thought to actually making a photograph himself, and he collected cartes-de-viste of his family and friends, including other artists. The Self-Portrait in oil was created just about the time the first cartes-de-viste appeared in Paris and it has the quality of being painted from a photograph. Degas’ American peer, photographer Charles Sheeler was also primarily a painter, yet turned to photography around 1912 in order to make a living. Initially he worked on assignments from architects to photograph their buildings while beginning to exhibit his paintings and photographs. Drawing from his dual painting and photographic skills, Sheeler received recognition for both mediums. “My interest in photography, paralleling that in painting, has been based on admiration for its possibility of accounting for the visual world with an exactitude not equalled by any other medium. The difference in the manner of arrival at their destination - the painting being the result of a composite image and the photograph being the result of a single image - prevents these media from being competitive,” says Sheeler. When Degas took up photography for his own creative purposes he first returned to self-portraiture for the first time since 1865, only this time in photographs, patiently holding poses for the camera by lamplight. Degas then went on to make individual portraits of his friends and family, with group portraits developing into his most complex photographs. Malcolm Daniel, curator of the exhibition and Associate Curator of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, said, “Degas explored the plastic possibilities of every medium he used, unfettered by generally accepted rules of proper technique. His own photographs are the antithesis of the unstructured and instantaneous images one might imagine: they are carefully posed and lit.” A true genius of multiple mediums, Degas never relied on set formulas, meekly turning out dependably popular material that would go down well with an established clientele. He continually felt the need to discover fresh techniques and unconventional means of expression. To see further examples of Degas’s photography refer to "Edgar Degas. Photographer", a Limited Edition book at Dymocks Bookstore $90, Degas: Passion and Intellect Henri Loyrette printed by Thames and Hudson.
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