Degas and Photography - More

In an essay in his book (which I have been reading), To The Rescue of Art, Rudolf Arnheim (1904-2007) explains how the composition of a double portrait by Edgar Degas affects how we think about the relationship between the couple portrayed. Here is the portrait:

Edmondo and Thérèse Morbilli, 1867
Edgar Degas (1834-1917)
Source: The Athenaeum

Degas painted this picture of his sister and her husband in 1867. Arnheim points out Thérèse's fearful expression, her hand on her face and the other hand barely touching her husband's back as if she's afraid of him, the shadow of her husband on her face, the fact that she is behind him and taking much less space than he does in the picture, the "reserved and suspicious" look on his face, his knee thrust "forward against the viewer," the spreading out of his elbows to take over as much room as possible (as she, in contrast, shrinks away), and "the almost brutal insensitivity of the husband's domineering right hand." As Arnheim says, "The message could not be clearer." I think we can all agree with that; this is not the kind of marriage that a woman hopes for.

Arnheim goes on to say that this type of pose was new to art, and the reason behind it was photography.

Degas did not begin taking photographs himself until he was sixty-one years old, in the mid-1890s (at which time he became a very enthusiastic photographer); however, he had been interested in photography for three decades by that time. See my earlier post on Degas and Photography.

Arnheim explained that in earlier times painters (and sculptors) portrayed their subjects in conventional ways utilizing conventional gestures; but when people who were not aware of or didn't see the need for or didn't have the patience -- or their subjects didn't have the patience -- to follow those conventions started taking pictures with cameras, there were endless examples of "unposed" or "accidental" poses. "What is new here," writes Arnheim about this painting, "is that the telling constellation is caught in the kind of accidental pose that may come about when the visiting brother asks the family to let him take a snapshot."

In other words, as I understand it, he meant not that Degas caught them in such a pose and got it down fast; rather, Degas was aware of what an accidental pose could reveal and so he invented a very un-accidental "accidental-looking" composition in order to say what he wanted to say about the couple. The result is that it looks very real to us and we feel a great deal of uneasiness when looking at the picture.

I don't mean to imply that what we "know" about this couple as a result of seeing this painting is the complete truth about them, or even that it our interpretation (or Arnheim's) of their relationship is necessarily completely accurate. The point is that how we feel about them is a result of how Degas painted them, and he was quite aware of what he was doing.

As an interesting aside, I want to add another painting, of the same couple, that Degas painted a year or two earlier. It is nothing like the painting discussed above.

Edmondo and Thérèse Morbilli, 1865-66
Edgar Degas
Source: Source: The Athenaeum

In this painting of the same couple, Degas' sister and her husband, it is his sister who is dominant and the feeling is extremely different. Between the time Degas painted this portrait and the one in 1867 the couple lost a child, and this might help explain the change in the way they felt about themselves and each other and the way they were seen by Degas, and it also might help us interpret the "signs" a little differently.
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Artists and Photography - Degas

Edgar Degas enthusiastically photographed ballet dancers, his friends, himself, and other subjects. (If you click on the "ballet dancers" link, you will come to a web page that shows three of his negatives of photographs of dancers.) He referred to photographs while making some of his paintings and drawings -- not copying entire photographs but just using parts of them as a guide to certain details such as the twisted back of a woman bending over or the arms of a ballet dancer while in a pose that was hard to keep. As pointed out on this page on the same site, Degas eventually went back to relying much more on his sketches for his paintings as at that time a camera was not capable of capturing split seconds and a pose had to be held for a very long time, making it practically impossible to photograph a movement or casual position. Besides, it's hard to capture in a photograph what we "see" in real life. We do not see, for instance, action as a series of frozen stills -- we experience it as continuous movement, and so a painting or drawing made without reference to photos (but, instead, with knowledge of how people actually experience what they see) can look more real than what is captured by a camera. Making many, many sketches of real things as he saw them turned out to be of much more use to Degas than the camera, though he did appreciate some uses of photography as an aid to an artist, and he certainly had a lot of fun with it.

There is quite a lot more on Degas and photography on the above-mentioned site, and I recommend you click around to different pages.

Four Dancers - c. 1899
Oil on canvas
Edgar Degas, French Realist/Impressionist Painter and Sculptor,
1834-1917
Source: Humanities Web

The painting above is one of those that was made with the help of photographs.

According to this article, although Degas had been interested in photographs three decades earlier, he did not take up photography himself until he was sixty-one years old. "[In] a burst of creative energy that lasted less than five years, [Degas] threw himself into photography for a short but intense period." There is much more in this article about Degas and photography.

This article, entitled "Camera Obscura," in Slate Magazine, is about the 1999 exhibition of Degas' photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. There are small photographs from the exhibit here, but although you are supposed to be able to enlarge them, it didn't work for me. Watch the video below on this page to see many of Degas' photographs.

Note 1: A Los Angeles Times article entitled Reframing Degas is also about the exhibition of Degas' photographs.

Note 2: Since writing this post on Degas and Photography, I've written another called Degas and Photography - More.

Note 3: Excellent article on Degas and photography. It is an article called "Dance to the music of time" in RA (Royal Academy) Magazine, Autumn 2011

Note 4: There are now four posts in this series about Artists and Photography. This on on Degas is the second. The first was about Delacroix. The third is on Vuillard and Photography, and the fourth is the second post on Degas and Photography, mentioned in the paragraph just above.

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