Portrait of the Artist as the Photographer

Imagination is not only harder to come by than knowledge, it’s finally more important. To see how, visit “Edgar Degas, Photographer,” the small but thoroughly captivating exhibition that was among the highlights of the New York art season in the fall, and that has now opened at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Brentwood.

You can search the literature in vain for a compelling overview of this remarkable artist’s photographs, finding mostly passing mention that he had briefly experimented with a camera. Degas (1834-1917) famously worked in a variety of mediums, including painting, sculpture, pastel and printmaking, so a foray into the new and burgeoning field of photography is not wholly unexpected. But his photographs, which Degas began to make only in his 60s after critical and financial success allowed his withdrawal from active participation in the Parisian art world, are not widely known. This full-scale show is practically his public debut as a photographer.

The centerpiece is a group of 35 black-and-white photographs and three colorful glass-plate negatives, which comprise just about all Degas’ significant works in the medium that are known to have survived. Exactly when he began to use a camera isn’t known for sure, but the earliest pictures are thought to be lost. Those at the Getty were all made in 1895, or perhaps early 1896.

Whether they were ever publicly exhibited during his lifetime also seems to be a matter of some dispute. In the exhibition’s catalog, Metropolitan Museum curator Malcolm Daniel, who ably organized the show, writes that they never were. In “Degas: Beyond Impressionism,” the powerful 1996 exhibition of the artist’s late paintings, pastels and sculptures, independent scholar Richard Kendall notes that a display of his photographs was mounted once, in 1895.

Whatever the case, Degas’ photographs will not be obscure any longer. Some of these pictures are flat-out incredible. The years around 1895 comprise a critical moment in the long arc of Degas’ career, and it is interesting to speculate on the possible impact his brief but brilliant flirtation with photography had on his work in other mediums.

Degas, his eyesight failing, had always been identified as a Realist among the Impressionist artists with whom he had made his reputation. But his late work shows an embrace of an increasingly symbolist point of view. A possible link between Degas’ emergent symbolism and his photographic experimentation is pointedly suggested in the exhibition and underscored by the way it is installed in the Getty’s galleries.

In addition to the photographs, the show includes one notebook of pencil sketches, one pastel, three monotypes, a posthumously cast bronze sculpture and four paintings, which together argue for a reading of significant aesthetic continuity across mediums. Most pointedly, a remarkable face-off has been arranged between Degas’ eccentrically erotic oil, “After the Bath, Woman Drying Herself” (1894-96), borrowed from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and three exceedingly strange glass negatives of a ballerina posing, which date from the same moment.

The painting is accompanied by a black-and-white photograph of a bather that is clearly related to it--perhaps even a study. But it’s the color negatives that are provocative.

The ballerinas, their arms, torsos and costumes edged in gray-green, are all but obscured by a searing flare of crimson, yellow and orange color that overwhelms each of the small glass-plate negatives. (It’s assumed the vivid color was created, whether by accident or intent, through the addition of unidentified chemicals or solarization during development. The negatives have been lighted from behind for the show.) Across the way, the painted nude displays herself stretching awkwardly over the back of a daybed; the sketchy black lines of her twisting torso are engulfed in a glowing inferno of red-orange color.

Degas had painted many portraits earlier in his career, but by 1895 the subject had taken a back seat to dancers and bathers in his work--except, it turns out, among his photographs. Portraits dominate here, accounting for 30 of the works on view.

No photograph in the show is more arresting than a double portrait of the artist’s friends, Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Symbolist poet Stephane Mallarme, posed before a mirror. In the looking glass at the left, you can make out the reflection of the boxy camera and tripod with which the photograph was taken, along with the shadowy figure of Degas surrounded by a bright aura of fuzzy white light created by burning oil lamps.

The composition of this riveting picture is divided into quadrants, bisected vertically by a line between the mirror and the wall and horizontally by the mirror’s bottom edge. Both lines intersect the seated Renoir’s tilting head, which is also the fulcrum for strong diagonals formed by the placement of the figures.

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A deep, velvety black space at the lower left is matched by a bright white space at the upper right. Dark, shadowy forms at the lower right match hazy, glowing forms at the upper left.

This stable, balanced, geometrically ordered composition is symptomatic of Degas’ abiding interest in principles of Renaissance art, learned during sojourns in Italy and in the galleries of the Louvre, and it reflects his lifelong interest in classical forms (his first teacher was Louis Lamothe, who had been a pupil of Ingres, French classicist par excellence). Degas deploys the composition as a kind of sturdy visual armature for something that couldn’t be more different: a sense of almost extreme subjectivity, which dramatically butts heads with all claims to descriptive recording of reality that were then being applied to camera images.

What at first appears to be a straightforward double portrait of Renoir and Mallarme actually contains a surreptitious self-portrait of Degas, who portrays himself elliptically in the mirror as a kind of apparitional demigod calling all the shots. In this persuasive photograph, any faith in fact-based rendering is trumped by the assertion of creative power.

“My art has nothing spontaneous about it,” Degas famously said. “It is all reflection.” His photographs, like his other late work, are places where imagination reigns supreme.

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* J. Paul Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Brentwood, (310) 440-7300, through March 28. Closed Mondays.