Lot Essay
Monotypes form an intense and very separate chapter in the oeuvre of Edgar Degas whose first encounters with the medium date from the 1870's. Although Degas seems to have returned to this favoured technique in the early 1880's, he subsequently abandoned it entirely until the end of his life when he produced largely abstract landscapes created from memory.
For an artist such as Degas, fascinated as he was with experimental media, the facility and freedom of the monotype was a revelation. The slow-drying greasy ink used on the monotype plate allows the artists to work at a leisurely pace (only the actual printing requires a certain speed as the print must be made before the dampened paper dries out) as well as allowing for the possibility of altering the actual image.
As a subject, the explicit scenes of the brothels were executed in monotype only - of which roughly fifty have survived. This intimate subject matter forms a perfect marriage with the small scale of the works - as daring in the liberties taken with space and composition and style as in their erotic narratives. These seemingly rapid compositions, executed from memory stand quietly and privately apart in relation to Degas' more mainstream 'public' oeuvre. The great majority of these prints were never exhibited and are akin to that century's existant genres of the "pornographic print and the gentleman's after-dinner album, to be shared with artist's peers, such as Renoir, who clearly knew some of them, but not with polite society" (R. Kendall in Degas intime, The impromptu Prints, Degas Monotypes, Copenhagen, 1994)
Historians have tended, in grouping the monotypes together, to view them in narrative sequences or as potential illustrations to accompany literature and indeed there were several novels of that time that dealt with prostitution, J.K. Huysemens' Marthe, histoire d'une fille was published in 1876 followed by Zola's Nana and Edmonde de Goncourt's La Fille Elsa. These books were written by author's known to Degas and there exist several of his notebooks with drawings inscribed 'La Fille Elsa', although the monotypes themselves have never been tied to any known book. Later, Ambroise Vollard used some of Degas brothel monotypes to illustrate an edition of Maupaussant's La Maison Tellier using others the following year for Pierre Louys' Mimes des Courtisanes de Lucien. The small, post-card size and almost Muybridge-like sense of a captured instant or snapshot relate these monotypes as much to photography (of which Degas himself was an early practicioner) as to illustation. For Degas, these brothel scenes depict his own first-hand experience in these Parisian establishments and as such are a reflection of the realism of his art. The emphasis on separating the monotypes from the rest of Degas' oeuvre (as is often done with his sculpture) belies the importance of this essential, if less numerous, aspect of his work which relates not only to the artist's love of experimentation and chance, but his overriding concern with the depiction of "la vie moderne".
En attendant le client, a recently rediscovered monotype, is minimalist in its depiction of the traditional accoutrements of the prostitute. There is the bed, the mirror and, depicted as a reflection - made up of Degas own fingerprints - the client himself. The mirror is a clin d'oeil to a pictorial tradition as used in paintings such as Velasquez' Rokeby Venus. For Velasquez, the mirror serves to reflect a face as beautiful as his Venus' figure. Here, the mirror is a banal prop witnessing the anonymous client who enters the scene with a stomach as imposing as such famous figures of Mr. Bertin or Balzac. But the mirror gives depth to the room, so the at once ghostly and simianesque client lends a profundity to an otherwise superficially trivial erotic scene.
This composition, seemingly so avant-garde in style and anticipating in subject Toulouse-Lautrec's treatment of the same by nearly two decades, still links Degas' modern unjaundiced eye to a more traditional, academic artistic heritage so essential to the Nineteenth Century. The Louvre's Corregio is here transported with the client - a modern day Jupiter disguised as a satyr - and the prostitute a contemporary Antiope. An academically noble but fictitious mythological event formerly treated on a grand scale has been traded for a realistic description of a daily non-event. Even the composition of this intimate, immediate 'sketch' is clearly reminiscent of Titian's reknowned Venus and the Organ Player from the prostitute's pose down to the detail of the bracelet that dangles from her wrist.
For an artist such as Degas, fascinated as he was with experimental media, the facility and freedom of the monotype was a revelation. The slow-drying greasy ink used on the monotype plate allows the artists to work at a leisurely pace (only the actual printing requires a certain speed as the print must be made before the dampened paper dries out) as well as allowing for the possibility of altering the actual image.
As a subject, the explicit scenes of the brothels were executed in monotype only - of which roughly fifty have survived. This intimate subject matter forms a perfect marriage with the small scale of the works - as daring in the liberties taken with space and composition and style as in their erotic narratives. These seemingly rapid compositions, executed from memory stand quietly and privately apart in relation to Degas' more mainstream 'public' oeuvre. The great majority of these prints were never exhibited and are akin to that century's existant genres of the "pornographic print and the gentleman's after-dinner album, to be shared with artist's peers, such as Renoir, who clearly knew some of them, but not with polite society" (R. Kendall in Degas intime, The impromptu Prints, Degas Monotypes, Copenhagen, 1994)
Historians have tended, in grouping the monotypes together, to view them in narrative sequences or as potential illustrations to accompany literature and indeed there were several novels of that time that dealt with prostitution, J.K. Huysemens' Marthe, histoire d'une fille was published in 1876 followed by Zola's Nana and Edmonde de Goncourt's La Fille Elsa. These books were written by author's known to Degas and there exist several of his notebooks with drawings inscribed 'La Fille Elsa', although the monotypes themselves have never been tied to any known book. Later, Ambroise Vollard used some of Degas brothel monotypes to illustrate an edition of Maupaussant's La Maison Tellier using others the following year for Pierre Louys' Mimes des Courtisanes de Lucien. The small, post-card size and almost Muybridge-like sense of a captured instant or snapshot relate these monotypes as much to photography (of which Degas himself was an early practicioner) as to illustation. For Degas, these brothel scenes depict his own first-hand experience in these Parisian establishments and as such are a reflection of the realism of his art. The emphasis on separating the monotypes from the rest of Degas' oeuvre (as is often done with his sculpture) belies the importance of this essential, if less numerous, aspect of his work which relates not only to the artist's love of experimentation and chance, but his overriding concern with the depiction of "la vie moderne".
En attendant le client, a recently rediscovered monotype, is minimalist in its depiction of the traditional accoutrements of the prostitute. There is the bed, the mirror and, depicted as a reflection - made up of Degas own fingerprints - the client himself. The mirror is a clin d'oeil to a pictorial tradition as used in paintings such as Velasquez' Rokeby Venus. For Velasquez, the mirror serves to reflect a face as beautiful as his Venus' figure. Here, the mirror is a banal prop witnessing the anonymous client who enters the scene with a stomach as imposing as such famous figures of Mr. Bertin or Balzac. But the mirror gives depth to the room, so the at once ghostly and simianesque client lends a profundity to an otherwise superficially trivial erotic scene.
This composition, seemingly so avant-garde in style and anticipating in subject Toulouse-Lautrec's treatment of the same by nearly two decades, still links Degas' modern unjaundiced eye to a more traditional, academic artistic heritage so essential to the Nineteenth Century. The Louvre's Corregio is here transported with the client - a modern day Jupiter disguised as a satyr - and the prostitute a contemporary Antiope. An academically noble but fictitious mythological event formerly treated on a grand scale has been traded for a realistic description of a daily non-event. Even the composition of this intimate, immediate 'sketch' is clearly reminiscent of Titian's reknowned Venus and the Organ Player from the prostitute's pose down to the detail of the bracelet that dangles from her wrist.