Lot Essay
The theme of the bather occupies an important position in Degas's oeuvre alongside other representations of modern life: laundresses, horse races and the ubiquitous ballet dancers. The bather made a significant appearance in Degas's experimental work of the 1870's, in a series of dark-field monotypes of 1879-1883 and in etchings of circa 1879. In the mid-1880's Degas took up the theme in the pastel medium, producing a magnificent suite of bathers between 1884 and 1886. Femme au tub belongs to this series.
In a private space exposed to the viewer's probing gaze, Degas's bather performs her intimate toilette as a servant holds a towel. The servant appears in related works of the period -- in a monotype of circa 1880 (fig. 1) and in a pastel of circa 1885 (fig. 2) -- although her presence in Femme au tub is decidedly fragmentary. The bather pastels of the mid-1880's (figs. 5 and 6; Hillstead Museum, Farmington, Connecticut, and Musée d'Orsay, Paris) reprise many of the compositional strategies Degas had developed in his dark-field monotypes, which in turn derive from the artist's lurid brothel monotypes of 1876-1877. In several instances, Degas worked the pastel medium directly on a monotype ground, perfecting the composition and correcting the bather's anatomy and figural disposition. In other cases, the relationship of a monotype to a pastel may be likened to that of a preparatory drawing to a painting, as Degas reworked the spontaneous and fluid effects of the black and white monotypes into a more finished composition. Indeed, Degas explored a range of new formal and technical strategies in monotype, later adapting his discoveries to the pastel medium. Gary Tinterow writes of the dark-field monotypes of female nudes:
Heretofore [Degas] had built up compositions by assembling in a
predetermined, fictive space figures that he had first developed
in drawings. With monotype, working with printer's ink on a zinc
or copper plate, Degas could compose in an organic rather than
additive manner and easily erase or revise what he had done. When he printed the monotype, he had the structure of his image in place, as if he had made a photographic print which he could then
tint with colors. The experience of working in monotype seems to
have been important to the development of the larger pastels of
bathers because in both the nude figure was made the primary element around which the space and accessories have been fitted.
This new, synthetic approach became crucial to his working method for the rest of his career. (exh. cat., Degas, Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York, 1988, p. 411)
Degas was increasingly drawn to working in pastel. A Société des Pastellistes was founded in 1885, and the medium was in vogue. In the bather series, Degas fully exploited the rich, chalky surfaces of pastel, its luminosity and its versatility in producing both linear and painterly effects. In Femme au tub, the artist establishes a range of vivid textures by manipulating the medium: areas of color in the towel are blended together with great subtlety to create effects of softness and liquefaction (fig. 3). In contrast, the flesh of the bather is reproduced through an irregular technique of cross-hatchings, with the effect that the body has a tactile, but not especially inviting, surface (fig. 4). In other instances, this technique is employed to bring out highlights, as in folds of the towel, or to establish the play of reflections between the blue-green water in the basin and the bather's body. Here, Degas does not so much blend color as create a lattice-work of color to produce effects of great luminosity. Finally, pastel competes with the traditional tools of the draughtsman in Degas's practice as the artist employs it alongside charcoal to give definition to contours and thus establish a strong graphic quality. Robert Gordon and Andrew Forge explain:
Line was at the center of Degas's art. He was always searching for shapes that he could define by their edges. During the second half of his working life pastel, often allied with charcoal, became his main tool. Pastel could be both a painting and a drawing medium. Unlike Manet, Degas rarely used pastel flatly, to color with, but kept the linear quality in the forefront. However, by a completely novel transformation of traditional hatching, he developed a way of working the pastel line all the way across the drawing, often cutting it across or at right angles to the direction of the form
or carrying it beyond the boundaries of the form into the background. Long lines of colors are laid down one on top of another, threaded tightly across the surface of the page in a structure that resembles a fabric on the frame of a loom. Looking at these drawings the eye does not lose sight of the flat surface of the paper, which is emphasized and hardened by the parallel strokes. (R. Gordon and A. Forge, op. cit., p. 263)
The catalogue of the 8me Exposition de peinture (the last Impressionist exhibition), which opened on May 15, 1886, lists fifteen entries by Degas, including a series of ten bathers described by the artist as a "Suite de nuds [sic] de femmes se baignant, se lavant, se séchant, s'essuyant, se peignant ou se faisant peigner (pastels)" ("Suite of female nudes bathing, washing, drying themselves or being combed (pastels)"). It is likely that Degas actually exhibited only ten of the works cited, adding an additional pastel of three peasant women bathing after the show had opened. Of these, two paintings of milliners and six of the bather compositions have been securely identified. Although Femme au tub does not appear to have been among the entries, the critical reception of Degas's submissions to the exhibition sheds considerable light on the series as a whole.
Degas's bathers, free of narrative codes and the trappings of literary references, challenged social conventions governing the representation of the female nude in French art. Degas recognized the transgression, stating: "Two centuries ago I would have painted Susannah at her bath; now I paint mere women in their tubs." (D. Halévy, Degas parle, Geneva, 1960, p. 14) Critics were alarmed by the modernity of Degas's bathers -- in one reading, the tub may replace the shell from which Botticelli's Birth of Venus emerges (or closer to Degas's historical moment, William Bouguereau's version of 1879) -- and by the liberties the artist took with accepted canons of physical grace. Indeed, critics analogized Degas's bathers with animals, implicitly linking them with prostitutes or working-class women, and viewed the artist as a misogynist. Gustave Geffroy, for example, described the bathers as "high-class illustrations for a zoological treatise." (G. Geffroy, "Salon de 1886: VIII Hors du Salon -- Les Impressionnistes," La Justice, May 26, 1886, pp. 1-2) For Octave Mirbeau:
The woman crouching in a tub, pressing a sponge to her back, the one bent over, her back horizontal, rubbing her feet -- have, in their individuality, the beauty and the strength of gothic statues. Obviously these drawings are not done to inspire a passion for women, nor a desire for the flesh. Monsieur Degas, in these studies of the nude, has not sought voluptuous or graceful effects; he is not concerned with sentimental pose which inspires such enthusiastic odes to the arch of the loins, the globes of the breasts, outstretched arms and swanlike necks. Here, on the contrary, there is a certain ferocity which parades contempt of women and a horror of love. (O. Mirbeau, "Exposition de Peinture [1, rue Lafitte]," La France, May 21, 1886, pp. 1-2)
For the Symbolist author and critic J.-K. Huysmans, Degas seemed to vent his rage at human depravity in the bather pastels:
M. Degas, who seems to have been aggravated and irritated by the baseness of his world, must have wanted to take his revenge, and hurl in the face of his century the most extreme outrage -- by toppling the idol so constantly kept and cared for, woman, whom he debases as he depicts her, in her tub, in the humiliating poses of her intimate activities. (J.-K. Huysmans, Certains, Paris, 1889, p. 23)
As a group, these and other commentaries register a deep sense of ambivalence concerning Degas's bathers in relation to what Carol Armstrong has described as the artist's "deliberate revision of the syntax of the female body and of the structure of viewing in which it was traditionally situated." (C.M. Armstrong, "Edgar Degas and the Representation of the Female Body," in S.R. Suleiman, ed., The Female Body in Western Culture, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1985, p. 225) For Armstrong, Degas's bathers, through their self-reflexive, self-contained actions, represent a retreat from modern life as depicted by the artist's fellow Impressionists, and through the bodily incoherence of their awkward, contorted poses, they are seen to invert the body politic and social order of bourgeois Paris. (C.M. Armstrong, Odd Man Out: Readings of the Work and Reputation of Edgar Degas, Chicago, 1991) Moreover, bathing carried specific associations with clandestine sexuality at this time. While cleanliness was tied to social status and upward mobility, the female body remained a site of proscription; acts of personal hygiene were rigidly controlled through elaborate social rituals. The proximity of Degas's bathers to the viewer's gaze and the tactility of their flesh served to collapse the boundaries between physical contact and the touch of painting (in the sense of artistic technique). As Anthea Callen has argued, Degas's bathers appeared all too carnal to the 19th century viewer, suggesting that they were sexually available bodies cleansing themselves of moral filth, rather than ideal sites of erotic mystification. In Degas's practice, then, bathing is elided with degeneracy and prostitution, and the fragmented and dislocated bodies of the bather, in this reading, signify "a creature out of control." (A. Callen, "Degas's Bathers: Hygiene and Dirt--Gaze and Touch," in R. Kendall and G. Pollock, eds., Dealing with Degas: Representations of Women and the Politics of Vision, New York, 1991, p. 171)
Other 19th century critics, however, responded with great enthusiasm to the exhibition of Degas's bather pastels at the 1886 Impressionist exposition. Maurice Hermel, for example, characterized the series as "anatomical problems solved by an astonishing draftsman and rendered poetic by a colorist of the first rank." (M. Hermel, "L'exposition de peinture de la rue Laffitte," La France Libre, Paris, May 27, 1886, p. 2) Writing of a pastel similar to the present one, currently in the collection of the Musée d'Orsay (fig. 6), Hermel concluded appreciatively:
The pose is admirably true to life, the line of the back and curve of the thigh superb...the robust, supple contours express the
fullness of the body; the streaking of the colors conveys all the
nuances of the skin in light and shadow...all as masterfully
executed as could be. (M. Hermel, Ibid., p. 2)
(fig. 1) Edgar Degas, Sortie du bain, circa 1880
Cabinet des Estampes, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris
(fig. 2) Edgar Degas, La toilette après le bain, 1882-1885
Private Collection
(fig. 3) Detail
(fig. 4) Detail
Edgar Degas, Le tub, circa 1888
Norton Simon Art Foundation, Pasadena, California
(fig. 5) Edgar Degas, Le tub, 1886
Hillstead Museum, Farmington, Connecticut
(fig. 6) Edgar Degas, Le tub, 1886
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
In a private space exposed to the viewer's probing gaze, Degas's bather performs her intimate toilette as a servant holds a towel. The servant appears in related works of the period -- in a monotype of circa 1880 (fig. 1) and in a pastel of circa 1885 (fig. 2) -- although her presence in Femme au tub is decidedly fragmentary. The bather pastels of the mid-1880's (figs. 5 and 6; Hillstead Museum, Farmington, Connecticut, and Musée d'Orsay, Paris) reprise many of the compositional strategies Degas had developed in his dark-field monotypes, which in turn derive from the artist's lurid brothel monotypes of 1876-1877. In several instances, Degas worked the pastel medium directly on a monotype ground, perfecting the composition and correcting the bather's anatomy and figural disposition. In other cases, the relationship of a monotype to a pastel may be likened to that of a preparatory drawing to a painting, as Degas reworked the spontaneous and fluid effects of the black and white monotypes into a more finished composition. Indeed, Degas explored a range of new formal and technical strategies in monotype, later adapting his discoveries to the pastel medium. Gary Tinterow writes of the dark-field monotypes of female nudes:
Heretofore [Degas] had built up compositions by assembling in a
predetermined, fictive space figures that he had first developed
in drawings. With monotype, working with printer's ink on a zinc
or copper plate, Degas could compose in an organic rather than
additive manner and easily erase or revise what he had done. When he printed the monotype, he had the structure of his image in place, as if he had made a photographic print which he could then
tint with colors. The experience of working in monotype seems to
have been important to the development of the larger pastels of
bathers because in both the nude figure was made the primary element around which the space and accessories have been fitted.
This new, synthetic approach became crucial to his working method for the rest of his career. (exh. cat., Degas, Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York, 1988, p. 411)
Degas was increasingly drawn to working in pastel. A Société des Pastellistes was founded in 1885, and the medium was in vogue. In the bather series, Degas fully exploited the rich, chalky surfaces of pastel, its luminosity and its versatility in producing both linear and painterly effects. In Femme au tub, the artist establishes a range of vivid textures by manipulating the medium: areas of color in the towel are blended together with great subtlety to create effects of softness and liquefaction (fig. 3). In contrast, the flesh of the bather is reproduced through an irregular technique of cross-hatchings, with the effect that the body has a tactile, but not especially inviting, surface (fig. 4). In other instances, this technique is employed to bring out highlights, as in folds of the towel, or to establish the play of reflections between the blue-green water in the basin and the bather's body. Here, Degas does not so much blend color as create a lattice-work of color to produce effects of great luminosity. Finally, pastel competes with the traditional tools of the draughtsman in Degas's practice as the artist employs it alongside charcoal to give definition to contours and thus establish a strong graphic quality. Robert Gordon and Andrew Forge explain:
Line was at the center of Degas's art. He was always searching for shapes that he could define by their edges. During the second half of his working life pastel, often allied with charcoal, became his main tool. Pastel could be both a painting and a drawing medium. Unlike Manet, Degas rarely used pastel flatly, to color with, but kept the linear quality in the forefront. However, by a completely novel transformation of traditional hatching, he developed a way of working the pastel line all the way across the drawing, often cutting it across or at right angles to the direction of the form
or carrying it beyond the boundaries of the form into the background. Long lines of colors are laid down one on top of another, threaded tightly across the surface of the page in a structure that resembles a fabric on the frame of a loom. Looking at these drawings the eye does not lose sight of the flat surface of the paper, which is emphasized and hardened by the parallel strokes. (R. Gordon and A. Forge, op. cit., p. 263)
The catalogue of the 8me Exposition de peinture (the last Impressionist exhibition), which opened on May 15, 1886, lists fifteen entries by Degas, including a series of ten bathers described by the artist as a "Suite de nuds [sic] de femmes se baignant, se lavant, se séchant, s'essuyant, se peignant ou se faisant peigner (pastels)" ("Suite of female nudes bathing, washing, drying themselves or being combed (pastels)"). It is likely that Degas actually exhibited only ten of the works cited, adding an additional pastel of three peasant women bathing after the show had opened. Of these, two paintings of milliners and six of the bather compositions have been securely identified. Although Femme au tub does not appear to have been among the entries, the critical reception of Degas's submissions to the exhibition sheds considerable light on the series as a whole.
Degas's bathers, free of narrative codes and the trappings of literary references, challenged social conventions governing the representation of the female nude in French art. Degas recognized the transgression, stating: "Two centuries ago I would have painted Susannah at her bath; now I paint mere women in their tubs." (D. Halévy, Degas parle, Geneva, 1960, p. 14) Critics were alarmed by the modernity of Degas's bathers -- in one reading, the tub may replace the shell from which Botticelli's Birth of Venus emerges (or closer to Degas's historical moment, William Bouguereau's version of 1879) -- and by the liberties the artist took with accepted canons of physical grace. Indeed, critics analogized Degas's bathers with animals, implicitly linking them with prostitutes or working-class women, and viewed the artist as a misogynist. Gustave Geffroy, for example, described the bathers as "high-class illustrations for a zoological treatise." (G. Geffroy, "Salon de 1886: VIII Hors du Salon -- Les Impressionnistes," La Justice, May 26, 1886, pp. 1-2) For Octave Mirbeau:
The woman crouching in a tub, pressing a sponge to her back, the one bent over, her back horizontal, rubbing her feet -- have, in their individuality, the beauty and the strength of gothic statues. Obviously these drawings are not done to inspire a passion for women, nor a desire for the flesh. Monsieur Degas, in these studies of the nude, has not sought voluptuous or graceful effects; he is not concerned with sentimental pose which inspires such enthusiastic odes to the arch of the loins, the globes of the breasts, outstretched arms and swanlike necks. Here, on the contrary, there is a certain ferocity which parades contempt of women and a horror of love. (O. Mirbeau, "Exposition de Peinture [1, rue Lafitte]," La France, May 21, 1886, pp. 1-2)
For the Symbolist author and critic J.-K. Huysmans, Degas seemed to vent his rage at human depravity in the bather pastels:
M. Degas, who seems to have been aggravated and irritated by the baseness of his world, must have wanted to take his revenge, and hurl in the face of his century the most extreme outrage -- by toppling the idol so constantly kept and cared for, woman, whom he debases as he depicts her, in her tub, in the humiliating poses of her intimate activities. (J.-K. Huysmans, Certains, Paris, 1889, p. 23)
As a group, these and other commentaries register a deep sense of ambivalence concerning Degas's bathers in relation to what Carol Armstrong has described as the artist's "deliberate revision of the syntax of the female body and of the structure of viewing in which it was traditionally situated." (C.M. Armstrong, "Edgar Degas and the Representation of the Female Body," in S.R. Suleiman, ed., The Female Body in Western Culture, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1985, p. 225) For Armstrong, Degas's bathers, through their self-reflexive, self-contained actions, represent a retreat from modern life as depicted by the artist's fellow Impressionists, and through the bodily incoherence of their awkward, contorted poses, they are seen to invert the body politic and social order of bourgeois Paris. (C.M. Armstrong, Odd Man Out: Readings of the Work and Reputation of Edgar Degas, Chicago, 1991) Moreover, bathing carried specific associations with clandestine sexuality at this time. While cleanliness was tied to social status and upward mobility, the female body remained a site of proscription; acts of personal hygiene were rigidly controlled through elaborate social rituals. The proximity of Degas's bathers to the viewer's gaze and the tactility of their flesh served to collapse the boundaries between physical contact and the touch of painting (in the sense of artistic technique). As Anthea Callen has argued, Degas's bathers appeared all too carnal to the 19th century viewer, suggesting that they were sexually available bodies cleansing themselves of moral filth, rather than ideal sites of erotic mystification. In Degas's practice, then, bathing is elided with degeneracy and prostitution, and the fragmented and dislocated bodies of the bather, in this reading, signify "a creature out of control." (A. Callen, "Degas's Bathers: Hygiene and Dirt--Gaze and Touch," in R. Kendall and G. Pollock, eds., Dealing with Degas: Representations of Women and the Politics of Vision, New York, 1991, p. 171)
Other 19th century critics, however, responded with great enthusiasm to the exhibition of Degas's bather pastels at the 1886 Impressionist exposition. Maurice Hermel, for example, characterized the series as "anatomical problems solved by an astonishing draftsman and rendered poetic by a colorist of the first rank." (M. Hermel, "L'exposition de peinture de la rue Laffitte," La France Libre, Paris, May 27, 1886, p. 2) Writing of a pastel similar to the present one, currently in the collection of the Musée d'Orsay (fig. 6), Hermel concluded appreciatively:
The pose is admirably true to life, the line of the back and curve of the thigh superb...the robust, supple contours express the
fullness of the body; the streaking of the colors conveys all the
nuances of the skin in light and shadow...all as masterfully
executed as could be. (M. Hermel, Ibid., p. 2)
(fig. 1) Edgar Degas, Sortie du bain, circa 1880
Cabinet des Estampes, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris
(fig. 2) Edgar Degas, La toilette après le bain, 1882-1885
Private Collection
(fig. 3) Detail
(fig. 4) Detail
Edgar Degas, Le tub, circa 1888
Norton Simon Art Foundation, Pasadena, California
(fig. 5) Edgar Degas, Le tub, 1886
Hillstead Museum, Farmington, Connecticut
(fig. 6) Edgar Degas, Le tub, 1886
Musée d'Orsay, Paris