February 2-March 28, 1999
Location: West Pavilion
December 11, 1999
Los Angeles, CA.-Edgar Degas, one of the most revered of the artists
associated with French Impressionism, was also a talented photographer.
A revolutionary painter who became world renowned for his scenes
of ballet dancers, race horses at Longchamps, and other images of
Parisian life, Degas applied his genius to photography late in his
career. On view at the Getty Center from February 2 through March
28, 1999, Edgar Degas, Photographer assembles for the first time
all of his major surviving photographs, revealing the artist's surprising
achievement in a medium in which he has gone largely unrecognized.
The 40 extraordinary photographs in the exhibition range in subject
from portraits to dancers to street scenes and landscapes; they
include several remarkable nudes and brilliantly colored glass-plate
negatives. The photographs are shown with a few related paintings,
pastels, monotypes, drawings, and sculpture. Accompanied by a fully
illustrated scholarly catalogue, the exhibition places his photographic
investigations in the context of Degas' other work and includes
important loans from collections in the United States and France.
National support for the exhibition is made possible by Aetna.
The exhibition has been organized by The Metropolitan Museum of
Art, The J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Bibliothèque nationale de
France in cooperation with the Musée d'Orsay.
"We are delighted to have Edgar Degas, Photographer at the Getty
Museum," said Deborah Gribbon, Deputy Director and Chief Curator."
This thoughtful exhibition, and the fine catalogue produced by our
partners at the Metropolitan Museum, offer a rare opportunity to
see how Degas explored photography both as a form of preparatory
drawing and as a process of discovery that resulted in works of
art in their own right."
Added Weston Naef, the Museum's Curator of Photographs: "The photographs
that so excited the artist himself were bold experiments that he
shared with a small circle of friends and fellow artists. The images
are at times highly personal, sometimes theatrical, and occasionally
Symbolist in their meanings. They reveal his full command of a new
form of visual expression."
Born of French and Italian ancestry, Edgar Degas (1834-1917) abandoned
law studies in 1855 to pursue art, enrolling in the École des beaux
arts in Paris. Leaving Paris for Italy in the next year, he continued
his artistic education by copying works from the school of Leonardo
da Vinci. After returning to Paris in 1861, through the painter
Édouard Manet he met the group that would be known as the Impressionists.
Although he tried to avoid being labeled as such, Degas became one
of the first among them to achieve recognition.
By the time he began making photographs in 1895, Degas was 61
years old and the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition was
a decade behind him. Daniel Halévy, son of his old friends Ludovic
and Louise Halévy, introduced Degas to photography, prompting the
artist to acquire a camera that required glass plates and a tripod.
In a burst of creative energy that lasted less than five years,
he made a body of photographs of which fewer than 50 survive.
Malcolm Daniel, curator of the exhibition and Associate Curator
of Photographs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, said: "Degas explored
the plastic possibilities of every medium he used, unfettered by
generally accepted rules of proper technique. His own photographs
are the antithesis of the unstructured and instantaneous images
one might imagine: they are carefully posed and lit."
Exactly why Degas took up photography remains unknown. Clearly,
photography provided a new pair of eyes during the period when his
eyesight was failing. The illness and death of his sister, Marguerite,
in 1895 and his brother Achille in 1893 may also have played a role.
Photographs were for Degas a powerful tool of memory to recall his
loved ones, and the activity of photographing bound him closely
to an extended family-the Halévys-that embraced him in his time
of grief.
In the first of the three galleries housing the exhibition at
the Getty Museum are photographic portraits and self-portraits,
as well as earlier examples executed in oil. They remind the viewer
how Degas' vision extends across all media, his work in one medium
informing another. Especially intriguing is The Apotheosis of Degas
(J. Paul Getty Museum), a photograph made during one of Degas' visits
to the Halévy family in the seaside resort of Dieppe. It mimics
a famous painting in the Louvre, The Apotheosis of Homer, by Jean-Auguste-Dominique
Ingres, and shows Degas seated as Homer at the center of the composition,
surrounded by attendants (including Daniel Halévy). A local photographer
actually made the exposure in 1885, but the picture was conceived
and composed by Degas, anticipating by a decade the artist's direct
personal involvement with the medium. Also included in this gallery
is Self-Portrait with Zoé Closier (Bibliothèque nationale de France,
Paris), probably done in autumn of 1895, at the artist's Paris apartment.
His housekeeper stands behind Degas, not gazing meditatively, like
the artist, but looking directly at the camera with an expression
of indulgent concern.
The second gallery contains photographs of art collectors, a painting
related to this theme, and photographs of members of the artist's
circle. Four photographs representing close friends were made after
a dinner party in December 1895. Among those pictured are the Impressionist
painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir; the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé,
his wife, Marie, and daughter, Geneviève; Julie Manet (daughter
of Édouard Manet's brother and the painter Berthe Morisot); and
her cousins Paule and Jeannie Gobillard. In one interior (The Museum
of Modern Art, New York), Degas captures Mallarmé leaning against
a wall, his eyes directed downward at Renoir. The painter, tilting
his head back and fixing his gaze toward the viewer, is seated cross-legged
with arms gently folded. Demonstrating the photographer's complex
orchestration, Degas also places himself, his camera, and the flare
of his lamp within the composition. They are reflected in the mirror
behind Renoir, along with Mallarmé's wife and daughter.
Degas often illuminated his subjects with a single bright light
source. The figures seem to emerge from darkness. In a series of
individual portraits he made of Daniel and Louise Halévy in the
autumn of 1895, each sitter is pictured in the same armchair in
their home, under this Rembrandtesque light. They are seen in original
contact prints (about 3 x 4 inches) and in enlargements. Altogether,
these images show the artist's picture-making process and reveal
Degas' manipulations of space, scale, focus, and emotional effect.
In Louise Halévy Reading to Degas (J. Paul Getty Museum), another
enlargement from a contact print done about the same time, Degas
conveys unusual intimacy. It shows a vulnerable man's dependence
upon a friend in reading the newspaper at a time when his eyesight
was failing.
Degas' fluid movement between various media provides a focus for
the third gallery, in which his photographs are seen along with
works including paintings, drawings, a monotype, and even a bronze
sculpture. In After the Bath, Woman Drying her Back, a nude study
of 1896 (J. Paul Getty Museum), a model twists dramatically on the
back of a chair. She seems caught in a violent or acrobatic movement.
The only photograph known directly to form the basis for a painting,
it hangs nearby the major related canvas, After the Bath of 1896
(Philadelphia Museum of Art), and several smaller studies in pastel
and charcoal.
In this gallery are three richly colored glass-plate negatives
(Bibliothèque nationale de France) that have not been displayed
outside France before this exhibition. Flush with red and orange
hues, they contain the partially solarized forms of ballet dancers
that served as models for a small statuette and dozens of drawings
and pastels. These negatives, for which no positive prints exist
from Degas' lifetime, treat a theme central to his art with a remarkable
mystery and intimacy. The exquisite pose of the dancer adjusting
her shoulder straps (late 1895 or 1896) anticipates that of the
nearby sculpture, Dancer Adjusting the Shoulder Strap of Her Bodice
(The Metropolitan Museum of Art), which was modeled in wax in 1896-99
and posthumously cast in bronze in 1920.
At the Getty Museum, the exhibition can be seen concurrently with
Dance in Photography (February 2 through March 28), a related exhibition
drawn entirely from the Museum's collections and installed in a
nearby gallery. Edgar Degas, Photographer was seen first at The
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where it was organized by
Malcolm Daniel. The installation at the Getty Museum was organized
by Weston Naef, Curator of Photographs, with the assistance of Anne
Lyden, Curatorial Assistant. The exhibition will travel to the Bibliothèque
nationale de France, Paris, where it will be on view from May 31
through August 22, 1999.
Lecture:
On Thursday, February 4, 1999, at 7 p.m., Malcolm Daniel will present
a lecture titled Edgar Degas, Photographer, in the Harold M. Williams
Auditorium. Parking and seating reservations are required; call
(310)440-7300.
Catalogue:
EDGAR DEGAS, PHOTOGRAPHER
By Malcolm Daniel
With essays by Eugenia Parry and Theodore Reff 144 pages, 106 illustrations
(40 tritones, 63 duotones, 3 color); 10 X 11 in. ISBN 0-8109-6525-0,
clothbound $49.50 Publication date: October 1998 Published by The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Distributed by Harry N. Abrams.
For information about the catalogue, contact Marilyn Abel: (212)879-6850.
Available at the J. Paul Getty Museum bookstore. Tel: (310)440-7059;
Fax: (310)440-7742 Major credit cards accepted.
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