Текст книги "Edgar Degas"

This murky world of female commerce, in which predatory top-hat wearing males indulged, is illuminated in a fascinating, if somewhat lurid, way by two anonymous Parisian publications of the 1880s, when Degas was at the height of his career. Ces Demoiselles de l’Opéra, published in 1887 and attributed to Vieil abonné (‘a long-time season-ticket-holder’), offers a survey of all the female dancers that were active at the new Paris Opera and looks back nostalgically to the 1860s when Degas also began to interest himself in ballet at the old house in the rue Le Peletier.

The tone of the book is gossipy and mildly lecherous. The Vieil abonné seems more interested in the physical attractions of the dancers and in the racy details of their private lives than he is in the finer points of their dancing techniques. Mlle Eugénie Fiocre, the only female dancer described in the book and identifiably painted by Degas, is said to have ‘a nose for which an umbrella would be useful’ – Degas’ study of her shows that she had a rather turned up and exceptionally pretty nose – ‘but what a figure! One should go down on one’s knees in front of it – and behind!’

Ces Demoiselles de l’Opéra vividly conveys the flavour of the flirtatious conversations that Degas enjoyed with his young dancer models. Daniel Halévy, the son of Degas’ old friend Ludovic, noted that when Degas was with dancers he ‘finds them all charming, makes excuses for anything they do, and laughs at everything they say’.

The Vieil abonné recorded the foibles, the remarks, and the little habits of the dancers with the same affectionate indulgence. So we hear, for example, that the only distinguishing characteristic of Léontine Beaugrand was an inordinate love of chocolates, and how la petite Paillier was outraged when complimented by an admirer as looking like a Boucher, thinking that he was comparing her with a butcher. The Pretty Women of Paris was published in English in 1883, and describes itself on the title page as a ‘Complete Directory and Guide to Pleasure for Visitors to the City of Gaiety’.

The information offered about Parisian women is so comprehensive and so detailed that it cannot possibly have been compiled by one man. The tone throughout, though, is consistent – scurrilous and often misogynistic. It gives the reader the impression of coming face to face with all the anonymous and faceless women we find in Degas’ oeuvre, from star dancers to milliners and laundresses.

On the first page we encounter Ellen Andrée, who modelled for Degas’ The Absinthe Drinker. She is a very pretty fair woman, whose artistic talents are small, although her body is in splendid proportion for such a tiny creature. Her principal lovers count amongst the artists of the capital, for whom she has often posed as model. She has been photographed in many poses, always without any clothing, and these studies from life could have been purchased all over Paris for a small sum. She is very straightforward and kind-hearted, but cannot write or read easily, her education having been greatly neglected. She is about twenty-four years old.

It seems that the authors underestimated her age, her intelligence, and her dramatic talents. She is unlikely to have been sixteen when she posed as the weary prostitute in Degas’ The Absinthe Drinker in 1876, she clearly had the wit to hold her own among the rip-roaring company of Degas and his friends at the Café de la Nouvelle Athènes in the 1870s, and she went on to enjoy a long and distinguished career in the theatre.

On later pages of this ‘Directory and Guide’, we meet Thérèse Bréval, who ‘was a ballet-girl for a time, but soon grew tired of kicking up her legs for such small wages’; Marie Folliot, ‘formerly an assistant in a milliner’s shop, but her beauty singled her out for the advances of the seducer…’; Blanche de Labarre, employed in the corset department of a large store where ‘the habit of continually taking off and trying on so many corsets seems to have had an effect on her morals and made her ever afterwards only too ready to unlace her own…’; Amélie Latour, ‘a simple laundress’, who ‘used to carry washing home to the customers, who, in return for the clean linen she brought, would often rumple her chemise and petticoats’; the circus performer Oceana, ‘a female acrobat turning double somersaults without a stitch on is a splendid sight for a tired old rake…’; Countess Letischeff, who ‘began to frequent all the race-meetings round Paris’; and Glady and Marie Magnier, who both began life like Henri Murger’s Mimi by making artificial flowers.

Dancer Standing, her Hands Crossed Behind her Back, 1873.

Black and white chalk on mounted grey paper, 45 × 29.7 cm.

Private collection.

The Rehearsal of the Ballet Onstage, c. 1874.

Pastel over brush and ink drawing on cream paper, mounted on canvas,54.3 × 73 cm.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Degas’ most direct and explicit depictions of prostitution date from the late 1870s and constitute a series of monotype prints of brothels, which are exceptional in his oeuvre in a number of ways. By the time Degas came to produce these images, the Parisian brothel was already in decline and represented a somewhat old-fashioned way for the middle-class gentleman to take his pleasure.

The Pretty Women of Paris lists ninety-nine brothels within central Paris and a further seven in the suburbs. The 183 women described individually in the book all worked independently of brothels, however. Fanny Robert, for example, started her career in a brothel in Marseilles, but was ‘rescued and brought to Paris by a rich lecher’. ‘The women loll around on the plushly-upholstered furniture in relaxed open-legged postures, comfortable in their nudity or semi-nudity and in their proximity to one another.’ The life of a registered prostitute in a licensed brothel must have been a tough one.

Apart from the drudgery of the work, the women were subject to regular medical inspections and other petty and humiliating restrictions. Yet – as described in the fiction of the period and ‘realist’ cabaret songs – life in a brothel was not without its compensations and attractions. The song En Maison, sung by Damia, dubbed la Tragédienne de la chanson, tells of a young girl who is rescued from a brothel by marriage to a middle-class man, but who comes to miss the freedoms and the little habits of her life in the whorehouse. Degas’ prostitutes do not look oppressed or unhappy. These brothel scenes are the most exuberant images he produced and have an earthy humour and a joie-de-vivre not found elsewhere in his work. By contrast, it is the black-clad women of Degas’ portraits with their rigid body language who seem repressed and oppressed.

The good-humoured and warm-hearted behaviour of the women in the brothel prints anticipates the mood of Guy de Maupassant’s famous short story The House of Madame Tellier, published in 1881, in which the prostitutes lavish their warmth and affection on a young girl taking her first communion. ‘All the women were eager to fondle her, seeking an outlet for those affectionate demonstrations, that habit of caressing induced by their profession, which had impelled them to kiss the ducks in the railway carriage.’

Among the most delightful of the prints is The Name Day of the Madame, which Degas later reworked in pastel. A portly madame, dressed in respectable black and looking horribly like a caricature of the Widow of Windsor (Queen Victoria), is surrounded by girls wearing only shoes and lavender stockings who offer her bouquets of flowers.

Once again we are reminded of La Maison Tellier, in which the women of the house ‘threw their arms round Madame Tellier and hugged her, as if she was an indulgent mother overflowing with kindness and good will’. The stocky women depicted in these monotype prints belong to a different physical type – almost, it would seem, to a different species – from the statuesque laundresses, the more slender dancers and the tightly-corseted middle-class ladies. This sturdily thickset type was clearly heavily in demand by 19^th-century clients of prostitutes. The adjective ‘stout’ is used with great approbation throughout The Pretty Women of Paris.

Many of the women are described in terms strongly reminiscent of Degas’ images. Marie Kolb is ‘a pleasant, little ball of fat’, and Blanche Querette ‘a most lascivious dumpling, and every bit of her fleshy frame is deserving of worship’. Berthe Laetitia is ‘short, and her well-rounded form is developed to the utmost, all her bones being covered with firm layers of elastic flesh, and her breasts and buttocks being sights to behold’. Marie Martin is ‘a fine, dark, Spanish-looking, matronly woman, with semi-globes like a Dutch sailor’s wench, and a pair of hips and a monumental backside that would make a Turk go off like a bottle of ginger-beer on a hot day’. Berthe Mallet is ‘the very woman for a man who likes to wallow in a mass of white flesh…’ Several of these prints, as well as many of the later pastel and oil Toilettes, show Degas’ fascination with large and fleshy buttocks. Here, too, he shared tastes with the compilers of The Pretty Women of Paris, who were enthusiastic about the ‘enormous, fascinating buttocks’ of Ernestine Desclauzes.

As for Zulmar Bouffar, the brilliant operetta star who created the role of the pretty glove-maker Gabrielle in Offenbach’s La Vie Parisienne, they tell us that ‘her best parts are her posterior beauties: even the Hottentot Venus cannot boast such a well-formed pair of sculptured marble buttocks’.

The residents of Degas’ brothels differ from the bland, idealised nudes exhibited at the Paris Salons not only in their physical proportions and facial types, but also in their frank display of abundant pubic hair. Nowhere is the sexual schizophrenia of the 19^th century more apparent than in the contrast between the hairless perfection of 19^th-century academic nudes and the relish with which the pubic hair of the women in The Pretty Women of Paris is itemised in the most minute and precise detail.

So we learn that Bacri ‘can boast the best bush that ever grew below a moll’s navel’; that the mons veneris of Laure Decroze ‘is protected by a splendid, soft, curly chestnut bush’; ‘The neat body and flowing locks of golden hue’ of Emilie Kessler ‘will be sure to excite desire in the male, especially when he makes the discovery that her tangled bush is as black as night, affording a rare and pleasing contrast.’ The brothel prints display a caricature and gently satirical element that is virtually unique in Degas’ work. This is most apparent in Degas’ mockery of the bashful bowler– or top-hat wearing clients, dressed as always in the black uniform of the ‘undertaker’s mutes’.

The Dance Class, c. 1873.

Oil on canvas, 47.6 × 62.2 cm.

Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

The Dance Class (detail), c. 1873.

Oil on canvas, 47.6 × 62.2 cm.

Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

In The Serious Client, for example, a curvaceous prostitute (whose body is modelled almost entirely in Degas’ fingerprints) reaches out to encourage the timid bowler-wearing client. In several of these images, the notorious acerbity and terseness of Degas’ conversational wit finds a nice visual equivalent in the oblique and abbreviated way that he refers to the presence or approach of the male client.

In the Salon shows a black-suited client with a top hat and stiffly-starched shirt collar entering a room filled with prostitutes disporting themselves in the most carelessly abandoned poses. In Repose and The Customer, we see no more than the client’s nose and a narrow strip of the black fabric of his trousers. One of the most voluptuous of the brothel monotype prints, Two Women (Scene in a Brothel), combines two potent male fantasies: lesbianism and interracial sex.

If we are to believe the authors of The Pretty Women of Paris, lesbianism, or ‘tribadism’ as they so quaintly put it, was common practice amongst Parisian prostitutes, although its extent may well have become exaggerated in their overheated imaginations. These lesbian encounters are described in the book with that curious mixture of moral disapproval and salivating prurience that still characterises attitudes to sex in much of the British popular press.

So we read of the ‘disgusting caresses’ common to French prostitutes and the ‘Sapphic ties, of which Parisian unfortunates are generally so fond’, and of Janvier, ‘an insatiable devotee of lesbian love’, who ‘pursues her prey in the corridors of the Opera like a man’, of Nina Melcy, mistress of a British Member of Parliament, who ‘adores her own sex, but only when there is an important debate in the House’, and of Juliette Grandville who is ‘often Sappho by day and Messalina by night, rushing eagerly to the arms of her masculine adorer with the glorious traces of some girlish victim’s excitement on her feverish ruby lips.’ To see lesbian activity was clearly exciting to many men in 19^th-century Paris.

We are told of Thérèse Bréval, that ‘a favourite after-supper diversion is the spectacle of Thérèse making love to one of her own sex’. Still closer to Degas’ print is the description of the love-making of Laure Heymann with the black Countess Mimi Pegère: ‘It is a glorious sight to see the fair Laure locked in the serpentine embrace of the lecherous little Sappho, who is as black as coal, being a native of Haiti.’ In its listing of the licensed brothels of Paris, The Pretty Women of Paris describes the brothel at 12 rue de Charbanais as ‘The finest bagnio in the world. Each room is decorated in a different style, regardless of expense… A negress is kept on the establishment. This is a favourite resort of the upper ten, and many ladies, both in society and out of it, come here alone, or with their lovers, for lesbian diversions.’ The monotype prints of brothels are among the most private and personal of Degas’ works. It was rare for him to treat the theme of prostitution as directly and openly in his larger-scale and more public works.

An exception, though, was Women on a Café Terrace, which Degas showed at the Third Impressionist Exhibition in 1877. Like The Name Day of the Madame, it is executed in pastel on top of a monotype print, but on a considerably larger scale. It shows gaudily-plumed and fashionably-dressed prostitutes going about their business of attracting passers-by on a busy gas-lit boulevard.

These women could easily be the sisters de Lamothe described in The Pretty Women of Paris as looking ‘extremely attractive’ by gaslight and as ‘assiduous frequenters of the fashionable cafés of the Boulevard each night’. At the approach of winter they ‘pack up their bidets for Nice, where they astound all beholders with their ultra-fashionable clothing and commanding appearance’. The top-hat wearing, dark-suited gentleman disappearing hurriedly to the right is evidently a potential customer. The woman to the left, rising from her seat, but shown bisected by a column, may be responding to his furtive invitation. Most striking of all is the prostitute in the centre, who raises her thumb to her teeth in an insolent and provocative gesture that has been much commented upon and variously interpreted. We know from Guy de Maupassant’s short story Playing With Fire – about a respectable woman who catches the attention of a passing male from her balcony, with disastrous consequences – that an almost imperceptible gesture in the street was all that was needed to strike a sexual bargain.

From the brothel to the opera house was not such a great leap, if we are to believe the authors of The Pretty Women of Paris. ‘All the women at the National Academy of Music are venal whores, and to outline their biographies would necessitate a volume devoted to that building alone, which is nothing more than a gigantic bawdy-house. From the apprentice ballet-girl, just out of her teens, down to the high-salaried principal songstress, all are to be had for the asking – the payment varying from a supper and a new pair of boots, to hundreds of pounds.’

With a view softened somewhat by nostalgia, the Vieil abonné also evokes the sexually-charged atmosphere of the old opera house in the rue Le Peletier. ‘Then, pushing through the lobby door which led onto the stairs of the wings, spreading up these staircases – trotting, chirping, humming, laughing, opening love-letters, breathing in bouquets of flowers, nibbling sweets or apples – [went] the entire flight of these charming creatures, the loves and the pleasure of Paris at that time, who were the light, the animation, the life, the joy of the poor old building…’

In the last thirty years of the 19^th century when Degas painted and drew his images of dancers, ballet was going through an artistic trough and was far from the respected and elevated art form it had been since the time of Diaghilev. After visiting Degas in his studio in 1874, the writer Edmond de Goncourt noted in his diary that Degas was able to demonstrate various balletic positions. The sight of the conservative and already rather middle-aged Degas performing pirouettes in his studio must have been a strange one.

The Absinthe Drinker or Glass of Absinthe, 1875–1876.

Oil on canvas, 92 × 68.5 cm.

Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

Women Combing their Hair, 1875–1876.

Oil on paper, mounted on canvas, 32.4 × 46 cm.

The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

However, it seems likely that it was not so much the techniques of dancing that fascinated Degas as the louche atmosphere backstage. Degas rarely depicted an actual performance, and when he did, the illusion is always compromised by some intrusive element of banal reality, such as the top of a musical instrument that rises up from the orchestra pit or a glimpse of the dark trousers of the star dancer’s ‘protector’ standing in the wings. Although the atmosphere of the backstage traffic in flesh is all-pervasive, it is once again only in the more private medium of the monotype print that Degas gives it more explicit expression. In the late 1870s, around the time that Degas produced his brothel prints, he used the same medium for a series of sharp and witty illustrations to the stories written by Ludovic Halévy about the Cardinal family: two young dancers at the Opera, Pauline and Virginie, and their parents M. and Mme Cardinal, who nurture their daughters’ dancing and amorous careers.

Halévy, who, today, is chiefly remembered as co-librettist (with Henri Meilhac) of Offenbach’s wittiest operettas, and of Bizet’s Carmen, which first introduced to the operatic stage the kind of working-class girls that fascinated Degas, achieved an enormous popular success in France between 1870 and 1880 with his stories about the Cardinal family. In Ces Demoiselles de l’Opéra, the Vieil abonné acknowledges the truthfulness of Halévy’s portrayal of the unscrupulous mothers’ jealously guarding their daughters’ virginities only to auction them off in due course to the highest bidder.

As well as the ‘high’ art forms of opera and ballet (however debased), Degas greatly enjoyed the popular art form of the Café-Concert, which reached its peak in the 1870s. In works towards the end of that decade such as Café-Concert at ‘The Ambassadors‘ and The Song of the Dog (both executed in pastel on top of a monotype print), Degas vividly captures the animated gas-lit atmosphere of the Café-Concerts, with the gaudily dressed prostitutes weaving their way through the crowds in search of customers.

According to The Pretty Women of Paris, not only did prostitutes find the floors of the Café-Concerts rich hunting-grounds, but many took to the stage in order to increase their connections and display their charms. Perrine, for example, ‘graces the music-hall stage with her presence, but only for the purposes of prostitution, for she has but a piping, shrill little voice.’ The Song of the Dog shows the most famous café-concert star of the time, Thérésa.

Degas enthused about her. ‘She opens her mouth and out comes the largest and yet the most delicate, the most wittily tender voice there is.’ Earning a reputed 30,000 francs a year and the owner of a magnificent house at Asnières, Thérésa had no financial need for prostitution but, in the words of The Pretty Women of Paris, ‘Thérésa is occasionally sought after by rich strangers, who spend a few hours with her out of curiosity’. We are also informed that ‘the curse of her life has been her voracious appetite for active tribadism’ and that ‘if the rakes who seek the enjoyment of her body bring a fresh-looking girl with them as a sacrifice to the insatiable Sappho, they will not be asked for a fee…’.

In the 1880s, Degas began the splendid series of Toilettes – women washing and drying themselves and combing their hair – which constitutes one of his greatest achievements. These Toilettes mark a significant break with the Post-Renaissance tradition of depicting the female nude as a glorified pin-up self-consciously displaying her charms for the benefit of the male viewer.

As Degas explained to the Irish writer George Moore, ‘Until now the nude has always been represented in poses which presuppose an audience, but these women of mine are honest, simple folk, involved solely and entirely in what they are doing. Here is an individual person; she is washing her feet. It is as if you were looking through a keyhole.’ In none of these Toilettes does Degas individualise the facial features of his models. Faces are either hidden or blurred and indiscernible. Degas’ subject is ‘woman’ rather than particular women. He observes her behaviour with the pseudo-objectivity of a scientist studying a primitive tribe or another species. Such an attitude seems disconcerting in today’s moral and political climate. Degas himself remarked ‘I have perhaps too often perceived woman as an animal’.

Another reason for Degas’ avoidance of his models’ faces may have been his disgust for the slick and salacious female nudes on show at the Paris Salons. The obscenity of those pictures lay not so much in the nudity as in the coyly enticing facial expressions. There were those who regarded Degas’ Toilettes as an attack on womanhood and a denial of sensuality. Even Joris Karl Huysmans, who greatly admired Degas’ work, took this view, claiming that Degas had ‘in the face of his own century flung the grossest insult by overthrowing woman, the idol who has always been so gently treated, whom he degrades by showing her naked in the bathtub and in the humiliating dispositions of her private toilet’. For Huysmans, Degas gloried in ‘his disdain for the flesh as no artist has ventured to do since the Middle Ages…’.

Far from disdaining flesh, many of these Toilettes express a powerful if sublimated eroticism. Both colour and line become increasingly charged with sensuality as the series progresses. The rituals of washing can be erotically charged, as we see from The Pretty Women of Paris, in which the personal hygiene of the women is described in enthusiastic detail. Clara Dermigny would offer her customers erotic books to read ‘while she is getting ready for them by performing the preliminary ablutions’, and Elina Denizane was nicknamed Fleur-de-Bidet ‘because she is always astride that useful article of furniture, which plays such an important part in the toilette of a Frenchwoman’. It is no coincidence that the theme of the Toilette was first touched upon in the series of monotype prints devoted to the brothel in the late 1870s. In Admiration, the voyeurism is made comically explicit by the appearance of a portly middle-aged man who seems to crawl up from underneath the bathtub. In another print from the series, a dark-suited gentleman quietly watches a nude woman combing her hair. There is an oblique hint of ‘preliminary ablutions’ in works such as The Morning Bath in the Institute of Art in Chicago, or The Bath in the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, in which a bed is placed prominently in the foreground. In both cases the viewer would seem to be watching from the bed itself, although the ablutions could perhaps be more accurately described as post-coital rather than preliminary, for the beds are already rumpled.

Dancers Backstage, 1876/1883.

Oil on canvas, 24.2 × 18.8 cm.

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

The Ballet Scene from Meyerbeer’s Opera “Robert Le Diable”, 1876.

Oil on canvas, 76.6 × 81.3 cm.

Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Amongst the most voluptuous of Degas’ nudes are those combing their hair. Degas was fascinated by women’s hair. There are stories of him happily combing the hair of his models for hours on end. In one of the odder episodes of his career, he alarmed the family of his friend Ludovic Halévy by writing a formal letter to request permission to see Geneviève Halévy (widow of the composer Georges Bizet) with her hair down. Such hair fetishism was common in many late 19^th-century artists and writers. The novelist Elizabeth Gaskell remarked on Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s fascination with women’s hair, and described how when a woman with beautiful hair entered the room he was ‘like the cat turned into a lady, who jumped out of bed and ran after a mouse’. Among the many other artists of the period who had some sort of fixation on women’s hair were Münch, Mucha, and Toorop. The literature of the late 19^th century also abounds in erotic images of women’s hair. Pierre Louÿs’ poem Hair (which inspired an exquisite song by Claude Debussy) expresses the claustrophobic sensuality of being enveloped in a woman’s hair. Most famous of all is the scene in Maurice Maeterlinck’s play Pelléas et Mélisande in which Mélisande leans out of her bedroom and allows her abundant hair to fall over Pelléas standing beneath.

If Degas’ art is permeated from beginning to end with overtones of prostitution, it remains nevertheless quite untainted by any element of sleaziness. In his famous series of essays inspired by the Salon of 1846, Baudelaire speculated on the often depressing and disappointing representations of erotic subjects and why this was the case. The defect of most, he thought, was ‘a lack of sincerity and a naïvete’. But he believed it was possible to make great art out of such subject matter. ‘All things are sanctified by genius, and if these themes were treated with the necessary care and reflection, they would in no way be soiled by that revolting obscenity which is bravado rather than truth.’ It is precisely his ‘naïve’ truthfulness and the element of reflection that enable Degas to transmute base metal into purest gold. As Renoir remarked to the dealer Vollard apropos the monotype print of The Name Day of the Madame, ‘At first sight such a subject may often seem pornographic. Only someone like Degas could endow The Name Day of the Madame with an air of joyousness and with the grandeur of an Egyptian bas-relief.’

Laundress Carrying Linen in Town, 1876–1878.

Oil on canvas, 46 × 61 cm.

Paul J. Sachs Collection, New York.