|
COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Although Edgar Degas, the son of a music-loving banker, is almost certain to have attended the Paris Opera from an early age, the fact that he didn't begin painting its dancers until he was thirty-three years old has long puzzled art historians, and the painting with which he began, the large, dreamy pastoral scene known as "Mlle Fiocre in the Ballet 'La Source,' " has puzzled them even more. Three women on a riverbank, one playing a lute, the two others bathing their feet while a horse drinks, suggest nothing that could be part of a ballet. One would not even think to connect the subject with dance but for the pair of pink satin ballet slippers lying on the bank between the horse's forelegs. That little detail and Degas's original title provide the only clues to the meaning of the picture, and it is a very oblique title--"Portrait de Mlle E. F. . . .; a propos du ballet de la Source." Not in the ballet "La Source" but only a propos of it. When the painting was unveiled in 1868 at the Paris Salon, viewers were no less mystified than they are today. Zola admired its execution, but thought it should have been called "A Halt Beside a Pool." Under its misleading latter-day, probably posthumously imposed title, the portrait of Mlle. Fiocre has hung since 1921 in the Brooklyn Museum, one of the last paintings to be sold from Degas's private collection, following his death. Currently, it can be seen in the show "Degas and the Dance," at the Detroit Institute of Arts until January 12th, and at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from February 12th to May 11th. As the cornerstone of a major show, the work that forecast the artist's lifelong obsession with the ballet, "Mlle Fiocre" becomes an object of curiosity all over again. Is it a stage scene, a real scene that happens to be on a stage, or an altogether real scene? Who are the two other women? Above all, what was Mlle. Fiocre to Edgar Degas that he should have pictured her thus?
The matter of the setting is addressed by the show's curators, Jill DeVonyar and Richard Kendall, who relate "Mlle Fiocre" to the tradition of theatrical paintings that deleted the stage frame and presented the scene in its natural state. "Mlle Fiocre" is unusual in being, as they say, a "hybrid composition," neither in one world nor the other. The riverbank could be covered with vegetation or Oriental carpeting--one's eyes can believe both. But what about the water and the horse? Some art historians (and, I fear, some dance historians) have assumed that the painting represents not an actual scene in the ballet "La Source" but a break in rehearsal. Well, no. There was water on the stage in "La Source," just as there were horses--in the first act, Fiocre entered on horseback, in a caravan--but surely it was not the Opera's custom to water the horses on the stage, and surely Degas knew how to paint painted scenery. He chose not to show us the flow of water over canvas that evoked gasps when the curtain went up. (The gasps were actually caused less by the waterfall than by the electric light that illuminated it.) No, we are not in a theatre. This is not a stage set. Those rocks are real rocks, and that water is a real pool, deep and dark.
The reality of the source, then--the spring, the fountainhead--is what Degas is interested in painting, not the illusion. The depth of his engagement with the subject leads me to think that he had it in mind before he even saw the ballet. The origins of dance--ancient, Eastern, feminine--had been hinted at by Ingres and Corot and Delacroix, but it was Degas who gave voice to the idea. The fact that nothing in Degas's work leads up to this moment--no previous ballet pictures, no sign, among dozens of sketches of entertainers, of any special interest in the dance--suggests that "La Source" came as a revelation, or at least as a means of focussing what may have been years of unreflective pleasure at the ballet. Art historians have tended to recoil from the notion of Degas as a balletomane, and maybe he himself resisted becoming one, but there is no question that he developed his balletic sensibility among the abonnes at the Opera. In the catalogue essays, DeVonyar and Kendall concentrate--a little too exclusively, I think--on Degas at the Opera, building up a case for his connections with that institution, his intimate knowledge of backstage operations, and his...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
