Downtown Washington, DC has been a ghost town for quite some time, with virtually the entire federal government and supporting professional workforce long ago sent home by the pandemic and all those “largely peaceful protests.” The Smithsonian museums long remained closed, but the National Gallery, situated among them yet a distinct entity, cautiously reopened to the general public on July 20, 2020. Its reopening was subject to masks and limited timed entry slots, but it allowed for a renewed run of this exhibition of works by Edgar Degas (1834-1917), which originally opened on March 1 and lasted only a short while before Covid-19 closed everything down.2
The exhibition’s title is a bit deceptive. Its subject is not Degas’s impressions of opera as an art form, but rather his creative work in and around the milieu of Paris’s Opéra, the French capital’s storied performing arts institution. Historically, the Opéra has presented both opera and ballet, the latter of which interested Degas far more even though ballet was in decline relative to opera for most of his adult lifetime. Shared with Paris’s Musée d’Orsay, which mounted this exhibition in late 2019 to celebrate the 350th anniversary of the Opéra’s founding, it mainly features works from American collections, including a large number from the National Gallery itself. They chronicle in illuminating detail Degas’s interest in less visible aspects of the theatrical experience – rehearsals, backstage drama, actions in the wings, the orchestral musicians, the audience, and other perspectives that the artist observed, remembered, or, as was often the case, imagined.
The exhibition opens with a seminal work, Degas’s painting of a dance sequence that occurs within an opera, The Ballet from “Robert le Diable” (1871-1872), the titular opera by Giacomo Meyerbeer composed in the French “grand opera” style that required a ballet. This canvas reflects Degas’s attraction to the contrast of performance and audience. The bottom third of the painting depicts an all-male group of spectators who are mostly ignoring the action on stage, a dance sequence for a cast of possessed nuns. The most prominent figure among the spectators is a middle-aged man pointedly looking through his opera glasses away from the stage and up at the boxes and, presumably, at the female spectators therein. The nuns, dressed in white, are vividly juxtaposed in a motion sweeping enough to obscure the line of their figures, which Degas executed in neater brush and sepia studies (presented alongside the painting) and then abstracted.
Degas’s interest in the human surroundings of performance radiates in a number of other works. His Portrait of Eugénie Fiocre (1867) depicts that leading dancer in the principal role of Léo Délibes and Ludwig Minkus’s ballet La Source, but eschews any depiction of dance or character in favor of a sumptuous portrait of Fiocre simply looking wan and tired in exotic costume. An homage more to the woman than to her art form, it precedes a room of containing The Orchestra of the Opéra (1870), which foregrounds the ensemble of musicians while limiting the view of the stage to the pink tutus of the dancers, whose heads fall above the frame. In a moment of personal license, Degas imaginatively rearranged the orchestra to reduce it in size, place the musicians in profile rather than facing away from the spectator, and to center his friend, the bassoonist Désiré Dihau, where the concert master, always a violinist, should be. This celebration of the milieu also features the composer Emmanuel Chabrier peering out of a box.
The world of performers beyond the idolization of fandom also captivated Degas. Rehearsals were not open to the general public or to him, either as an artist or as a ballet subscriber, but his imagination and some studio studies allowed him to produce evocative paintings of ballet in preparation. The actions and events are stylized, but his mind ran toward work-in-progress aspects of the art form. Such paintings as the aptly named The Rehearsal (1874) and Dancer Adjusting Her Slipper (1884) present unvarnished views of awkwardness in movement, with poses and footwork veering less toward the perfection at which instruction aimed than toward awkwardness and error inevitability encountered on that path. The surrounding studies, done in pastel, illustrate movements down to flexes of muscle that Degas later stylized in the paintings. His series of elongated panels and decorative fans telescope the figures and their environments in panoramas that recall the much larger processional masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance in their representation of figures serially deployed to create a larger scene. In the seminal The Dance Class (1875-1876), among other works, Degas imagines the Opéra’s longtime ballet master Jules Perrot nostalgically presiding over them, even though Perrot’s association with the theater preceded Degas’s major working period by several decades.
Perhaps the most striking example comes at the end of the exhibit, in Degas’s sculpture Little Dancer Aged Fourteen (1878-1881), a remarkably ugly image of the ballet pupil Marie van Goethem, who was dismissed from her studies for poor conduct and frequent absences and, never having mastered the graceful movements required by her art form, offered a model for the raw and unfinished qualities that Degas sought to convey in painting. Derided as hideous as its unveiling, Little Dancer and the story behind it developed a sort of cult following and were even the subject of a new ballet staged by the Opéra in 2010 (video on display).
The stage itself emerged in unusual perspectives that Degas came to privilege. Before Curtain-Rise (1892), done in pastel on paper, looks down at an angle on the last moments prior to the curtain going up, when a dresser whose work resembles genuflection puts the final touches on a dancer’s bright green costume. The Star (1876-1877) shows a prima ballerina in the throes of movement, but as she would be scene from a slightly elevated box at just above stage right. Here a pale white light radiates the figure in a preternatural shade suggesting moonlight as visible spectators in the wings enjoy their own unique perspective of her. Dancer Readjusting Her Strap (1889) captures backstage intimacy in a ballerina’s nervous attention to her costume as a colleague in front of her motions forward to perform.
As Degas encountered impressionism later in his career, he nodded to the newer school with what he called “orgies of color,” larger scale pastel works featuring flatter forms, deeper textures, and bolder and more vibrant hues. Four Dancers (1899) adapts the awkward off-stage motions of anticipation and nervousness familiar from his earlier oeuvre to a newer perceptive truth – that the dancers are not individuals but a swaying mass of undifferentiated femininity. As though to pay recently accrued artistic debts, the painting features backgrounded haystacks that acknowledge Monet’s influence. Degas’s earlier Portrait of Rose Caron (1892) stylizes and even obscures the features of its subject, a famous dramatic soprano for whom Degas wrote a sonnet, among other intimacies, and emphasizes her pale, elongated arms as she reclines while sliding on a glove.
If the exhibition was probably more interesting to its French spectators, who had less access to American-owned works, than to American patrons aware of Degas’s considerable presence in collections in their country, it certainly has an axe to grind. From the first explanatory panel, we are warned that Degas included “dark suited ‘subscribers’ (male season ticket holders) lurking in the wings.” “These wealthy and powerful men,” the text alerts us, “were allowed backstage where they could prey upon the young ballerinas whose poverty and inferior social position made them vulnerable to exploitation.”
The text ignores that Degas himself became a ballet subscriber in 1885, and was thus one of the evil old rich men he is imagined to have castigated in his art. But no evidence suggests that he engaged in any amount of criticism of himself, his fellow subscribers, or their alleged behavior, as the exhibition would have us believe. Its introduction to French theatrical life is thus, to borrow an already worn out woke cliché, “problematic.” It also seems a bit anachronistic. The text was almost certainly written prior to the Musée d’Orsay’s mounting of the exhibition last year, when we were still in peak #MeToo. Frozen in time by the pandemic, even if only for a few months, it missed the shift from sexual harassment accusations to implications of racism as our society’s principal dog whistle for social and cultural transgression. Indeed, in light of the wokesters’ recent pivot to fervent anti-racism, which is sweeping the art world as relentlessly as any other institutional environment, the exhibition’s opprobrium of “predatory” dark male figures “lurking” to “prey upon” young white women could well invite censure in post-George Floyd America.
Perhaps more importantly, the exhibition commentary stands out in stunning ignorance of the realities of nineteenth-century theatrical culture. Backstage attachments certainly happened, but I am unaware of even one case in which a ballerina ever registered a complaint or regret about suffering “exploitation” at the hands of one of her admirers, many of whose attachments were chaste and even unspoken. There are, however, many famous cases, then and now, in which ambitious women cultivated, consented to, and, indeed exploited such protectors to advance their careers or general condition in life. The French courtesan Marie Duplessis did it so well before she died at age 23 that she became immortalized in Degas’s lifetime as a Dumas protagonist in print and a Verdi heroine on stage. Mathilde Kschessinska, Imperial Russia’s most famous ballerina, secured the romantic patronage of the future Tsar Nicholas II and then moved on to two Romanov Grand Dukes, eventually settling down with one of them after an unmatched career at the height of her art form. But the presenters here would deny such women any agency, badly needing them, even at the height of fame and success, to be victims. No one viewing this colorful but misleading exhibition should believe they were.
2 “Degas at the Opera,” National Gallery of Art (Washington), March 1, 2020-October 12, 2020