Degas: A Passion for Perfection marks the centenary of Degas’s death on September 27, 1917. Clever acquisitions and more than one dose of good fortune has allowed the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge to build up exceptional holdings of Degas’s works in paintings, drawings, pastels, prints and sculpture (it owns the only original sculptures by Degas in Britain).
As any museum director will affirm, timing as much as acumen plays a crucial role in determining the quality of a public collection. Degas died as the German army threatened once more to advance on Paris, which may explain why his heirs lost no time in emptying out his studio and putting its vast contents up for auction. Alerted to this sudden and unexpected opportunity by the painter and art critic Roger Fry, Charles Holmes, director of the National Gallery in London, and the economist John Maynard Keynes, persuaded the Treasury in a “whirlwind” of negotiations to hand over £20,000 to place bids on behalf of the nation.
The first sale at the Galerie Georges Petit featured Degas’s own art collection. Keynes, an overnight convert to the art of collecting, also bought for himself, successfully bidding on Cézanne’s Still-Life with Apples, c1877-8 (now part of the Keynes Collection owned by the Provost and Fellows of King’s College, Cambridge, and on long-term loan to the Fitzwilliam). Keynes went on to buy several magnificent Degas drawings of nudes which alone make the trip to Cambridge worthwhile.
Curator Jane Munroe has organised the exhibition in a way that not only makes the most of the museum’s own collections of works by artists other than Degas – Corot and Thomas Jones, for example – but above all encourages us to see Degas as an artist obsessed. A regular visitor to ballet classes at the Opéra, to the seedy Paris brothels, theatres and gas-lit cafés, Degas preyed on city life, tracking it as ruthlessly as a paparazzo.
Degas’s other obsession was with the art of the past. As a student at the École des Beaux-Arts, he copied the old masters, not merely as an exercise but with the consuming passion and curiosity that would lead him endlessly to experiment, to rethink and re-imagine every aspect of his art. His respect for the past, for instance, may explain his choice of the dancer as one of his most thoroughly explored themes.
In her essay published in the excellent catalogue that accompanies the exhibition, Jill De Vonyar describes how the dance gurus of the time “insisted that the origins of ballet could be traced back to antiquity and described modern ballerinas as the progeny of Terpsichore, the goddess of music and dance”. As Degas wrestled again and again with his wax models, recording the gravity-defying movements demanded of the dancer, he must have been aware of this contemporary view of the origins of classical ballet.
Over time his fascination with the antique was matched – outdone even – by his curiosity about the modern. The ballerinas he sketched at the Opéra were a far cry from the graceful Terpsichores of the ancient world. These Parisian teenagers were all too real. Their fiddling and fussing with their tutus, straightening wrinkled tights, adjusting ballet shoes, their moments of crushing fatigue and boredom, their painful vulnerability and simple youth: these were the subjects Degas could not get enough of. He was a voyeur in the widest sense of the word.
A rarely seen early work borrowed for this exhibition points the way: The Wife of Candaules (c 1856) takes as its theme the story of a king whose pride in his wife’s beauty led him to entice his favourite bodyguard to spy on her as she undressed for bed. Degas shows the moment the naked woman, seen from behind (in an Ingres-like pose), senses she is being secretly watched. Degas was hardly a secret watcher (although why rule that out?) but he was certainly an omnivorous one. Which is one of the many reasons he is so admired by other artists.
The exhibition opens with a section documenting Degas’s attachment to England and to the English artists of the time. It closes with homages paid him by several modern English painters, including Howard Hodgkin, Frank Auerbach and Lucian Freud. Saved for last, however, is a painting that can only be described as a bombshell: Francis Bacon’s Two Wrestlers, a major oil of 1953 not seen in public since 1971, when it was included in the artist’s retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris.
It later hung in Lucian Freud’s bedroom in London, jealously guarded and never loaned to exhibitions. Degas’s fingerprints are all over it. It is Bacon’s masterpiece, and a thrilling conclusion to a celebration of the painter he loved above all others.
Degas: A Passion for Perfection is at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, until January 14.
Sarah Whitfield is an independent writer and art historian who sits on various authentication committees including those of René Magritte and Francis Bacon
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