Degas: Failing the ‘Nude’

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Degas and the Nude

By George T.M. Shackelford and Xavier Rey

Today we use the term ‘nude’ fairly loosely for getting your kit off  in art or life. For academic art theory in the 19th century, however, it signified ideal beauty, aesthetic disinterest and classic timelessness, the opposite of the controversial content, loaded sexual interests, and racy contemporaneity associated with today’s practitioners such as Marlene Dumas, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Eric Fischl. The period during which the clear academic idea of ‘nude’ painting became problematic was that of Realism and Naturalism in art, and Degas’s artistic involvement with the naked female image in retrospect occupied a significant moment in that history.

Such is the theme of ‘Degas and the Nude’, the impressive exhibition that has transferred from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, where it closes on 1 July 2012. ‘Degas and the Nude’ is promoted as the first ever exhibition devoted solely to its subject, though in fact all overviews of Degas in either exhibition or book form have devoted much space to this theme. In fact, Richard Thomson produced a book Degas: The Nudes in 1988, and such subject-matter was the object of extensive study by adherents of the ‘new art history’ in the 1980s–90s. Even so, it is just about true that, as the press release claims, this is ‘the first book in a generation’ on this theme.

After a stimulating discussion about Degas between the painter Lucian Freud and critic Martin Gayford, the catalogue looks at four main areas. Degas was committed to history painting until his turn to Realism in the second half of the 1860s, and the catalogue discusses at length his nude studies for such works. The second area is his monotype prints of naked females, either in their personal spaces or in brothels. (A monotype is produced either by coating a printing plate with ink, and then drawing by removal, as in the dark-ground nudes of c1879-83, or else by drawing the image with ink on the plate, as in the brothel monotypes, in either case then making a one-off print from the plate.)

The third area is the exhibition of a substantial group of six or seven pastels of women bathing or preparing themselves to bathe, exhibited at the eighth and last Impressionist exhibition in 1886. The fourth area is the massive production of similar female images done largely in pastel and charcoal but occasionally in oils over the following two decades. (Degas died in 1917 but none of these works is dated to beyond about 1905.)

We know that the artist’s ‘nudes’ became more numerous (just) than his dancer images in the second half of the 1880s and constituted about a third of his production in the mid-1890s, and were still just under half of his production in 1900. There was a massive disparity between his enormous production of ‘nudes’ and the small number actually exhibited. Degas chose to work in obstinate privacy and with dedicated seriality on relatively ‘unknown masterpieces’, in drawing materials on relatively fragile supports.

The catalogue text vacillates between arguing that there was only a subtle transformation in his later work  and that there was a dramatic new treatment of the nude for ‘his own gratification and for his own celebration of the body’, though it is difficult to imagine that in his earlier pastels and prints he was not doing this.

The exploration of Degas’ ‘nudes’ throws up other problems. The first is that the nude studies in the first quarter of the book are for history paintings, the polar opposite of his later realism. They were unknown by the public until the posthumous studio-sales of 1918 or (more permanently) Theodore Reff’s 1976 publication of The Notebooks of Edgar Degas. Unlike the later pastels, they were not considered works of art in their own right. Equally unknown were the monotypes. These were the sorts of image found in the print folios of male collectors, but they took decades even to begin to circulate on the market. We see all these ‘nudes’ together today as a single object of study within the covers of this catalogue, but we need to remember their different functions, status and histories.

A second problem lies in the very term ‘nude’ itself, even though the 1886 Impressionist catalogue actually used the term for convenience. It talked about a ‘suite of nude women bathing, washing, drying themselves, wiping themselves, combing their hair or having their hair combed’. The only justification for undress from a Realist viewpoint was the privacy of bedroom, bathroom or brothel. In representing naked women in specific milieus, Degas was undoing or ‘failing’ the ‘nude’ as an academic category of art associated with timeless idealism. Some critics understood such works as holding up real nakedness against the ideal of the classic ‘nude’. In other words, one shouldn’t say ‘nude’ when one meant ‘undressed’. Moreover, the emphasis (as the catalogue suggests) is on action, not classical repose. These daily actions were even then understood by a few critics as a rejection of features associated with ‘successful’ nude painting (marble-smooth flesh, passivity of pose, games of erotic tease and distance).

It was really as ‘anti-nudes’ that Degas’ pastels ran into critical difficulties at the 1886 Impressionist exhibition. After all, middle-class men were not accustomed to seeing respectable women at their toilette at all. Hence the supportive critic Gustave Geffroy suggested that Degas ‘wished to paint a woman who is not aware of being looked at, like one might see her if hidden behind a curtain or looking through a keyhole’.

Such intimate subject matter, represented in a detached way, was of course artificially constructed using models in the studio to look like a realistic scene, but that metaphor of Degas looking through a keyhole has been endlessly and misleadingly repeated ever since. The sort of tub represented in the exhibited 1886 works (as opposed to the bigger tubs with maid in attendance depicted later) may well have suggested lowly social strata.  Moreover, artistic nudes involved certain youthful and ‘perfected’ body norms, as well as a built-in erotic interaction  (either obvious or sublimated) with the (male) spectator. Degas’s paintings have a more realist variety of body-types and detachment.

All this helps us to understand the shock of seeing such images. Looking for the accustomed erotic push-and-pull of nude painting, critics would feel frustrated by Degas’s detachment. Some critics just ignored them, while others promoted the idea that Degas must hate women to represent them this way. For them, detachment was actually cynicism or misogyny. Lower-class overtones would lead the middle-class critic to find allusions to prostitution. These poses of everyday washing-actions, unseen by middle-class males (except in brothels perhaps), would be seen as socially suspect and animal-like, even by a supportive critic such as Geffroy.

The current catalogue Degas and the Nude is promoted as offering a change from some current feminist art history, although, especially in its discussion of the monotypes, it does absorb much from critical feminist accounts. It  claims that feminism ignores ‘the aesthetic qualities of the work in and of itself’, giving the ‘nudes’ ‘a dignity comparable to that of a Venus or a Madonna’. Such statements indicate a deep vein of style-centred art history running through this catalogue’s approach. The authors are preoccupied with finding similarities between early and late work, or between Degas’s work and that of other artists, often in a very forced or arbitrary way (e.g. a comparison between the raised arms of sculptures by Degas and Rodin). Despite these misgivings, there is some fine extended analysis here, and the catalogue is accessible and sumptuously illustrated, making it a book that many general art-lovers and art historians will want to buy.

Degas and the Nude by George T.M. Shackelford and Xavier Rey is published by Thames and Hudson, London, 2011. 244pp., 241 colour illus, £42.00. ISBN 978-0-500-09362-7