Edgar Degas - страница 9

As he grew older, Degas made more and more sculpture. “With my eyesight going,” he said to the dealer Vollard, “I now have to take up blind men’s work” (J. Bouret, op. cit., p. 209). He modelled, in wax, what he knew best: ballet dancers, horses, and nudes. Ambroise Vollard was crestfallen to see how Degas would destroy his wax masterpieces so he could have the pleasure, as he put it, of starting them again. In his last years, Degas was almost completely blind. He died 27 September 1917. Among the group of several friends who came to accompany him to Montmartre cemetery there was only one Impressionist: Claude Monet. The other friend who had survived him, Renoir, was confined to an invalid’s armchair. In the midst of the First World War, the painter’s death went almost unnoticed.

The Dance Foyer at the Opera on the rue Le Petelier, 1872.

Oil on canvas, 32.7 × 46.3 cm.

Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

The Dancing Class (detail), c. 1870.

Oil on wood, 19.7 × 27 cm.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Orchestra Musicians, 1872.

Oil on canvas, 69 × 49 cm.

Städel-Museum, Frankfurt.

Around the time the notorious 1863 Salon des Refusés 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 a perfect middle-class gentleman or, as the Cubist painter André Lhote put it, like ‘a disastrously incorruptible accountant’. Wearing the funereal uniform of the 19^>th-century male bourgeois which, in the words of Baudelaire, made them look like ‘an immense cortège 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 Jean-François Millet’s Angelus. Salvador Dalí’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.