Just finished reading Degas
and his model, a touching memoir by Alice Michel.
‘’Pauline thought about how
odd it was, this aversion on Degas’s part to any easy grace and his constant
search for poses that captured some vigorous action at his tensest moment. At
the same time he wasn’t blind to the harmony of line or the beauty of forms,
she knew, since he’d often praised his model’s body: her beautiful legs, her
charmingly plump arms, her delicate joints. But he couldn’t stand it when
Pauline put rouge on her lips or did her hair up in the latest fashion. Even with his faded eyesight, he’d never fail
to notice and, digging his fingers into her hair, he’d tug on it with all his
strengths. ‘When someone is as young and fresh as you are, there’s no need to go
playing the whore. Just stay as you were born! Natural, without al this frippery!’ It made her wonder why he
so loved to paint the theatre, where everything is a façade . But the question
seemed too difficult for her to puzzle out, so she quickly gave up on it. No longer thinking of anything, Pauline
mechanically held the pose. A furious
grunt made her spin around and she was taken by surprise to see Degas threatening
her with a hammer. “I’d like to break your head to pay you back for how slack
you are!’ he shouted. With a disdainful pout, Pauline looked at the little
hammer, barely big enough to pound in a tack. ‘That’s no tool for a sculptor!
You need at least a stonemason’s hammer’. ‘It’s true’, he said, beginning to laugh. ‘I’ll never be
any kind of sculptor’
‘’His coloured pencil in hand,
Degas hesitated. Finally he applied a tentative stroke to the background of the
pastel, then stopped to examine the
drawing, his face rigid in intense concentration. Pauline almost broke out in
tears when she remembered the rapid movements he would’ve drawn with in the old
days, compared to this trial and error. She left her bench and approached the
stove, turning her back on the old artist to shut out the pathetic
spectacle. She had heard barely a
handful of scratches of pencil on paper when all of a sudden the dull thud of a
heavy body hitting the floor echoed though the atelier. Degas had fallen completely over, dragging
the easel down with him. When Pauline ran to help him up, he cried: ‘Leave me!
Pick up the drawings first’. She obeyed and gathered up a number of drawings,
that had fluttered off in every direction. The, helping him to his feet, which
was no easy task, she asked: ‘What happened? Are you hurt?’ He gingerly felt
his arms and legs and said, reassured : ‘No, I haven’t broking anything…As I
was getting up, I hadn’t seen that my heel was caught on the easel and it
tripped me over. Look, my girl, my nice clothes are covered in dust’
David Zwirner Books
In contrast, Michel’s Degas is
an almost systematic inversion of the reverent testimonials current in the
French press in the years after the artist’s death in 1917. Degas, as seen by
the model Pauline, is no stoic devotee of the Muses but a curmudgeon subject to
sudden bouts of theatrical self-pity, always on the verge of collapsing into
melancholy ruminations over his failing sight, his oncoming death. The artist
famous for his deft public quips becomes, in private, a mealymouthed,
repetitious prattler, retailing twenty-year-old anecdotes for the two-hundredth
time. Instead of zingers (e.g., Gustave Moreau is “a hermit who knows what time
the trains leave”), the model is obliged to de-escalate incoherent rants about
Jewish conspiracies and feign interest in foggy reminiscences of trips to Italy
and bouts of pubic lice. This Degas is not only tedious company but a volatile
and occasionally violent taskmaster, liable to punch Pauline in the back or threaten
her with a hammer when the session isn’t going as well as the artist would
like, and perfectly capable of firing her for reading a book or—virulently
anti-Semitic as he was—posing for a Jew. But perhaps the most cutting feature
of Michel’s portrait is that “old Father Degas” is artistically impotent. He
can finish nothing, and statuettes that represent years of work over hundreds
of sessions crumble to dust before his eyes, to be begun again, and again, in a
cycle broken only by his death. Instead of a prolific visionary, Michel’s Degas
more resembles a Beckett character retrofitted for Third Republic melodrama.
The handful of art historians and
curators who have drawn on Michel’s text to establish chronologies for specific
sculptures, or for information about Degas’s late studio practice, otherwise
sparsely documented, have typically assumed that the text is authentic. The
editors of the 2012 French edition issued by L’Échoppe come to similar
conclusions, asserting that Michel and Pauline are pseudonyms for the same
individual, a model relating her firsthand experience. But there are certainly
reasons to suspect that the real nature of the text is not so straightforward.
In its original publication in the Mercure de France, it was presented without
commentary, and no explicit claims were made for its authenticity. Nowhere does
Michel state that she is Pauline or that the events she uses Pauline to narrate
constitute a “firsthand view.” The model herself remains a cipher: we learn
nearly nothing of her family life, of how she came to modeling, of what she
does when she’s not posing. She serves instead to establish a perspectival framework
that allows Michel to string together anecdotes about Degas, a format typical
of accounts of artists’ lives in the period. And those anecdotes often seem
carefully considered to hit on aspects of his personality that were, to some
degree, commonly known—his political conservatism, his gruff manner—as if
Michel were making an effort to hew just closely enough to testimonials by
individuals known to have been intimate with the artist. Finally, the decision
to begin Pauline’s account in medias res, with Degas’s light curse almost a
distant echo of Alfred Jarry’s famous “Pschitt,” is certainly a literary touch.
If Pauline is not necessarily Michel and vice versa, who could have been behind
all this? An unknown individual capitalizing on the spate of interest in Degas?
An associate of the recently deceased artist, male or female, writing under the
cover of a pseudonym to slightly deflate his skyrocketing posthumous
reputation? A journalist working from interviews with a model or models to
produce a synoptic account?
Are the intricate descriptions of
the artist’s studio and apartment sufficient evidence to demonstrate a kernel
of authenticity somewhere in the text’s nested pseudonyms? Despite the artist’s
notorious reclusiveness, previously published memoirs revealed at least some of
this supposedly intimate information. But Michel provides one detail that might
inspire confidence, precisely because of its seeming inconsequence: Pauline
reports two sessions in the course of which Degas drinks an infusion of cherry-bark
tea prepared for him by his maid, to ease a bladder disorder that forces him to
get out of bed a half dozen times a night to urinate. It’s a microscopic detail
that Vollard, in his own subsequently published book on the artist, also
mentions: “He was walking about with a bowl of cherry bark tea in his hand and
suddenly he looked up absently and said: ‘Do you have trouble urinating? I do,
and so does my friend Z.’ ” Homeopathic infusions and troublesome nocturia were
not, as might be expected, common features of testimonials about Degas.
From the introduction by Jeff
Nagy, who translated the book.
Paris Review
As we belatedly come to
recognize that social progress is halting at best, and it becomes harder to
flatter ourselves on our own enlightenment, it also becomes harder to relegate
Degas’ inhumanity to an artifact of a time when racism and bigotry were more
acceptable. His cruelty becomes, instead, an indelible component of his
artistry. This is admittedly precarious territory, but I believe it can be
argued that the obdurate politics of the two most prominent anti-Dreyfusards in
the history of modern art, Degas and Paul Cézanne, played a role in the
coldness infusing their relationship to the human form.
Cézanne famously rendered his
sitters, most notably his wife, Marie-Hortense Fiquet, with the same dispassion
he would apply to a bowl of fruit, setting off generations of painters and
sculptors in search of pure form. But his gaze also turned people into objects
of research, whose interest lay primarily in the formal possibilities they
presented to the artist’s imagination.
Degas’ portraits can be
breathtakingly beautiful, but they are also reserved and distant. The sitters
avoid eye contact with the viewer (as a stand-in for the artist), and when they
do, as in his self-portrait from 1857-58 in the collection of the Clark Institute
in Williamstown, Massachusetts, they look wary and world-weary. In the majority
of his signature depictions of dancers and bathers, the model’s face is turned
away or obscured. This was very likely done for formal reasons — to direct the
viewer’s gaze toward the entire composition, rather than zero in on the face —
but it also reduces the subject’s personality to her pose — which was
frequently torturous, as Pauline attests — and body type. The artist’s
insistence on strenuous positions resulted in muscularly expressive imagery,
but it also displayed a not-so-mild sadistic streak. In contrast to their academic contemporaries,
whose cloying and superficial paintings quickly achieved institutional
recognition and market success, Degas and Cézanne were unable to cloak their
ugliness in glazes and varnish: their conflict is our conflict; their
inhumanity is our inhumanity. It was their inadvertent honesty that made them
modern.
And the modernism they ignited
quickly raced away from them. The dramatic spine running through Degas and His
Model is the artist’s inability to complete Pauline’s sculpture — a second
version of “Dancer Looking at the Sole of Her Right Foot” (1910-11) — after
endless hours of posing. The practice of calibrated accuracy between model and
image, which Degas dragged like an albatross from the glory days of the French
Academy into the chaos of World War I, had been ambushed decades earlier by the
Impressionists, with Pablo Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” (1907)
delivering the coup de grâce. As Nagy writes in his introduction, “perhaps the
most cutting feature of Michel’s portrait is that ‘old Father Degas’ is
artistically impotent. He can finish nothing, and statuettes that represent
years of work over hundreds of sessions crumble to dust before his eyes, to be
begun again, and again, in a cycle broken only by his death. Instead of a
prolific visionary, Michel’s Degas more resembles a Beckett character
retrofitted for Third Republic melodrama.”
The Beckett reference is
particularly apt: every afternoon, dressed in rags because he refused to spend
money on clothes, Degas would shamble alone around the streets of Paris until
twilight forced him back inside. But every morning he would get up, eat breakfast,
brusquely greet his model, and engage once again, nearly blind and stewing with
resentment, in a solitary, pointless, and fruitless pursuit of beauty — a
20th-century figure despite himself.
Hyperallergic
Here more
information on Degas and his loss of eyesight.
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