Degas and drawing

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The sheer volume and variety of the artist’s work defy a full exploration but the glorious illustrations will keep readers happy

Edgar Degas: Drawings and Pastels by Christopher Lloyd

Christopher Lloyd’s new book on works on paper by Edgar Degas (1834–1917) starts with the artist’s student drawings after the masters and studies for his first history paintings, continuing through the early portrait studies and pastel portraits, studies for the first ballet pictures, the mature pastels of nudes, milliners and jockeys, and the early 1890s pastel-over-monotype landscapes. It culminates in the late pastel bathers, dancers and jockeys and in the riveting last pure charcoal nudes.

Lloyd suggests interestingly that Degas’ drawing overall marked a ‘breakdown in the hierarchical values in art imposed by the Renaissance’, when drawing had had a secondary status to painting. For Lloyd, Degas reverses this priority by choosing in practice to prioritize drawing (at least in the far greater number of drawings than paintings produced). Certainly Lloyd sees Degas as giving drawing equal status with painting and he emphasizes, in a general way, the experimental side of the artist’s handling in his late pastels. Lloyd also discusses how Degas used tracing to redeploy figures by reversal, combination, and various types of adaptation, a theme now well explored in previous books on Degas such as Richard Kendall’s Degas: Beyond Impressionism (Yale University Press, 1996) or Shackelford and Rey’s Degas and the Nude (Thames and Hudson, 2011).

Lloyd refers to the drawings as being on a par with those of the masters, an emphasis on Degas’ search for ‘perfection’ and on the continuity of his practice (arguing for a feeding of his art historical copying into his later work), and a focus on a retreat into the studio connected to ageing and increasingly poor eyesight.

These themes are common in writing on Degas, although they might all be open to a broader questioning. Degas had developed somewhat different artistic interests and criteria (certainly different from classical ‘perfection’) from those of Renaissance artists, and a massive wilful discontinuity was involved in his shift from history painting to modern life themes (with a concomitant shift in the conceived function of art). We might also question the way in which his late work is explained. If modern life themes continue, for example, one cannot really talk about a retreat from modern life. Moreover, when, in carrying pictures through to their conclusion, did middle-period Degas work outside the studio? Does blindness and ageing really provide an adequate explanation for the shift in the late work, when one can imagine his ending with exactly the same aesthetic qualities even if he had not become infirm in various ways?

The text often ends by glossing over the sheer strangeness of aspects of the work. What exactly was Degas up to in the essence drawings/paintings of the late 1860s and ’70s, which Lloyd vaguely relates to the search for originality? Were they perhaps demonstrations of sprezzatura (his skill in making his art appear effortless) or versatility, intended to construct an image of the modern-life master for potential private collectors? What models of strangeness and genius inhabited Degas’s mind when he did those strange late pastel-over-monotype-print landscapes? Lloyd tells us that Degas was independent-minded early on and that his father encouraged his sense of personal destiny. What ideas of ‘independence’ did Degas form and where did they come from?

The sheer detail given by Lloyd in the tracking of Degas’ career means that there is no focus upon specific cross-reference between the images and text. This actually weakens the theme of the book, its analysis of the artist’s drawings. Engagement with these stays distant and generalized. Some of that distance stems from the impossible clash between the art’s abundance and the constraints of publishing (where illustrations are limited by their expense). Never can all the known or locatable studies of an early ballet painting or all the serially related late images of a particular pose be published in one book.

Thus there are severe limits on how far any book can actually show us an artist’s drawing achievement. That said, Lloyd’s text does give us selective examples of how Degas’ works were made. The problem is simply that the functioning of the text does not leave space for much beyond such tiny glimpses. Nonetheless, one can certainly trust this book as a general overview of the artist’s career and how works on paper fitted into that career, and it will be for the glorious level of illustration of over 200 works on paper that most Degas enthusiasts will be wanting to buy this book.

Edgar Degas: Drawings and Pastels by Christopher Lloyd is published by Thames and Hudson, London, 2014, 320pp., 237 colour illustrations, £24-95, ISBN 978-0-500-09381-8