Stoop, Stile, and Swag
I spent last Saturday afternoon looking at naked women. Hundreds of them: dancers, prostitutes, women getting into bathtubs, women getting out of bathtubs, women combing their hair. Most of them were hanging on the walls. A few were up on pedestals or behind glass.
This was, you’ve guessed, the “Degas and the Nude” exhibit at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (http://www.mfa.org/exhibitions/degas-and-nude).
The show’s gotten interesting reviews. The New Yorker calls it “wonderful” but also “weird,” and the New York Times describes the “unstinting, even cruel, naturalism” the painter and sculptor brings to the subject of the female nude. But these judgments seem to me to miss an important point that the exhibit makes inescapably clear: these drawings and prints and pastels and paintings and sculptures are obsessive explorations, to be sure, but they’re obsessive explorations not of women or femininity or even the female body. They’re studies in architectural structure.
Much of the show’s wall text emphasizes style and surface. This is informative and interesting stuff, and I’m glad I know now how Degas used the reverse end of a paintbrush to incise lines through a heavily pasteled page or how he manipulated elements of the printing process to achieve effects of light and shadow. All that focus on textures, though, obscures what looking at these figures one after another, on wall after wall, in gallery after gallery, reveals. Underneath it all, these are representations of arches, spirals, intersecting helices, of structures that, like any good engineering design, distribute and direct force. Referring to the frequency with which Degas portrays women’s backs (the subjects are often facing away from the viewer), notes here and there in the show suggest a variety of motives, from the aesthetic (impersonality) to the psychological or political (some perhaps unsavory attitudes toward women).
Maybe. But all those turned and arched backs, like all those raised and arched arms and even all those tilted heads point to an obsession with specific shapes. Degas’ incipient modernism, his connection to a painter like Cezanne, is legible in these sculptural elements of bodies working in tension and balance, these masses coordinated along vectors, these bodies balanced against those in the settings. The curve of a bathing woman’s back is mirrored in one painting by the handle of a pitcher behind her, that of a breast is met at its apogee with the similarly shaped arm of a chair. In a late “Bathing Woman” (1890s), he even gives a hint on how to read these paintings by including a spiral gesture on the wall behind the figure that mimics the one her raised and curved arm describes.
If Degas had hung out at boxing matches instead of brothels and the ballet, we might be seeing those lines of force explored in right hooks and protectively clenched abdomens. He didn’t frequent boxing matches, though. The point the show makes, whether it intends to or not, is that where and with whom Degas spent his spare time matters less than what he saw there. And how he saw it. And how he makes us see it anew.
