Brodskaya Nathalia - Edgar Degas

Author: Nathalia Brodskaya

ISBN: 978-1-78160-597-4

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Nathalia Brodskaya

Edgar
Degas

Oil on canvas,92.1 x 66.5 cm.

Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon.

At around the time the notorious 1863 Salon des Refus s signalled the clear distinction in French painting between a revolutionary avant-garde and the conservative establishment, Edgar Degas painted a self-portrait which could hardly have looked less like that of a potential revolutionary. He appears the perfect middle-class gentleman or, as the Cubist painter Andr Lhote put it, like a disastrously incorruptible accountant . Wearing the funereal uniform of the nineteenth-century male bourgeois which, in the words of Baudelaire, made them look like an immense cort ge of undertakers mutes , Degas politely doffs his top hat and guardedly returns the scrutiny of the viewer. A photograph taken a few years earlier, preserved in the French National Library, shows him looking very much the same, although his posture is more tense and awkward than in the painting.

The Degas in the photo holds his top hat over his genital area in a gesture unconsciously reminiscent of that of the male peasant in Millet s Angelus . Salvador Dali s provocative explanation of the peasant s uncomfortable stance was that he was attempting to hide a burgeoning erection. Degas sheepish and self-conscious expression also suggests an element of sexual modesty. For an artist who once said that he wanted to be both illustrious and unknown , any speculation about his sexuality would have seemed to him an unpardonable and irrelevant impertinence.

Nevertheless, the peculiar nature of much of Degas subject matter, the stance of unrelenting misogyny he adopted, and the very lack of concrete clues about his personal relationships have fuelled such speculation from the beginning. As early as in 1869 Manet confided to the Impressionist painter Berthe Morisot, with whom Degas was conducting a bizarre and somewhat unconvincing flirtation, He isn t capable of loving a woman, much less of telling her that he does or of doing anything about it. In the same year, Morisot wryly described in a letter to her sister how Degas came and sat beside me, pretending to court me - but this courting was confined to a long commentary on Solomon s proverb, Woman is the desolation of the righteous ...

Photo, Bibliothque Nationale, Paris.

Rumours of a sexual or emotional involvement with another gifted woman painter, the American Mary Cassatt, can also be fairly confidently discounted, although the fact that Cassatt burnt Degas letters to her might suggest that there was something that she wished to hide. Degas failure to form a serious relationship with any member of the opposite sex has been attributed to a variety of causes, such as the death of his mother when he was at the sensitive age of thirteen, an early rejection in love, and impotence resulting from a venereal infection.

This last theory is based on a jocular conversation between Degas and a model towards the end of his life and need not be taken too seriously. In 1858, Degas formed an intense and sentimental friendship with the painter Gustave Moreau. The emotional tone of Degas letters to the older artist might suggest to modern eyes an element of homosexuality in their relationship. I am really sending this to you to help me wait for your return more patiently, whilst hoping for a letter from you... I do hope you will not put off your return. You promised that you would spend no more than two months in Venice and Milan.

But whereas Moreau s paintings exude an air of latent or even overt homosexuality, the same cannot be said of Degas . There are accounts of Degas chatting in mellow and contented mood with models and dancers towards the end of his life, but it seems likely that in common with many nineteenth-century middle-class men he was afraid of and found it hard to relate to women of his own class. His more outrageously misogynistic pronouncements convey a strong sense of his fear.

What frightens me more than anything else in the world is taking tea in a fashionable tea-room. You might well imagine you were in a hen-house. Why must women take all that trouble to look so ugly and be so vulgar? or Oh! Women can never forgive me. They hate me. They can feel that I leave them defenceless. I show them without their coquetry, as no more than brute animals cleaning themselves! ... They see me as their enemy - fortunately, for if they did like me, that would be the end of me!

Degas portraits of middle-class women have faces, unlike his dancers, prostitutes, laundresses, milliners and bathers who are usually stereotyped or quite literally faceless. On the other hand, these middle-class women may seem intelligent, rational and sensitive, but are nevertheless a grim lot, without warmth or sensuality. Many of Degas female relatives seem to be overwhelmed by frigid and loveless melancholy.

Oil on canvas, 116.5 x 88.3 cm. The Museum of Fine Arts,

Boston Donation of Robert Treat Paine II, 1931.

Oil on canvas, 200 x 250 cm.

Muse d'Orsay, Paris.

Oil on canvas, 79 x 118 cm.

Oil on canvas, 32.4 x 46.4 cm. The Metropolitan

Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of

Mrs H. O. Havemeyer, Collection H. O. Havemeyer.

Oil on canvas, 81 x 66 cm.

Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.

His nieces Giovanna and Giulia Bellelli turn from one another without the slightest trace of sisterly intimacy or affection. Grimmest of all is the portrait of his aunt, the Duchess of Montejasi Cicerale, and her two daughters in which the implacable old woman seems to be separated from her offspring by an unbridgeable physical and psychological gulf.