Reframing Degas

“Edgar Degas, Photographer.” Exhibition titles don’t get much shorter or more direct than that. Crisp and to the point, the name seems to indicate that the show, opening Tuesday at the J. Paul Getty Museum needs no explanation. But those who leap to the obvious conclusion and expect to see photographic equivalents of the French Impressionist’s famous paintings, drawings and prints are in for a shock. What’s on view is an obscure, incomplete body of work that looks quite different from his celebrated artworks.

Known for images of race courses, ballerinas and women bathing, dressing and working, Degas was the most naturalistic of the major French Impressionists. He was a master at portraying the careless gesture, the awkward stretch, the aching muscle and the gaping yawn, as well as the play of shimmering light on objects moving through space.

And, as many art historians have noted, he seemed to think like a photographer, depicting graceless body language from peculiar vantage points, in abruptly cropped, asymmetrical compositions. These techniques weren’t commonly used by photographers until after Degas made his paintings, and Japanese prints probably exerted a stronger influence than photographs on his work. Nonetheless, he is often described as a “photographic” painter--for understandable reasons.

As it turns out, Degas was interested in photography. He even devoted much of his energy to it during a short period in 1895-96. But his photographs evoke a completely different sensibility from the work for which he is known. The 40 images in the show--lonely landscapes, village street scenes, female nudes and moody portraits, self-portraits and figure groups in black-and-white, plus three mysterious glass-plate negatives of dancers in shockingly bright red and yellow--appear romantic and carefully staged. The “photographic” painter made surprisingly painterly photographs.

“It’s paradoxical that some of his paintings from the 1860s and 1870s have more of what we think of as a photographic aesthetic than the photographs themselves,” said Malcolm Daniel, the exhibition curator and associate curator in the department of photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

But the paradox is only one revelation of the exhibition--and a peripheral issue, at that. Fundamentally, “Edgar Degas, Photographer” is a landmark event that introduces a problematic body of work, formerly known only to scholars and now displayed in its entirety for the first time.

“We have 40 photographs, and there are another 20 that we know of but that don’t survive,” Daniel said, noting that many others have probably been lost. “Our mission was to take what has survived and try to understand what photography meant to Degas, what his achievement was and how we should look at the surviving work.”

The exhibition was jointly organized by the Getty, the Met, where it opened last fall, and the Bibliotheque Nationale de France in cooperation with the Musee d’Orsay in Paris, where the show will appear May 31 to Aug. 22. Most of the photographs are drawn from the collections of the organizing institutions; the rest were borrowed from other museums and private collections.

“This was exciting to work on because Degas was one of the great artistic minds of the century,” Daniel said of the exhibition. But the project presented unusual challenges.

“Degas is so well-known and his work so beloved by people, and his life is pretty well documented, but his photographs have remained a bit of a mystery because they were more of a private art. They were something that he was passionate about, that his friends knew about, but he never exhibited publicly [except for a small display in an art supply store]. Therefore, they were never seen by a wide audience. They were never discussed in the critical press or the art press, so we don’t have the contemporary analysis and reaction that we have for his paintings,” Daniel said.

“Also, the works were not highly valued at the time of his death. We have to remember that in 1917, when Degas died, there wasn’t such a thing as photo history. The works themselves weren’t immediately recognized as being part of his creative output.” Sculptures found after his death were accepted as part of his creative expression because “the artist’s fingerprints were on them,” Daniel said. “People didn’t have the same sense of the photographs.

“In addition, there wasn’t a market for the photographs. When the contents of his studio were documented after his death, nobody paid any attention to the photographs. We have no idea what the total body of work once looked like, what was discarded along with the refuse of the studio or what may have been intentionally destroyed, or what simply got dispersed and lost its connection to Degas,” he said.

“It’s difficult to have a sense of what Degas’ approach to the medium and his accomplishments were without having the total body of work in front of you,” Daniel said.

Even so, he and other scholars have compiled a great deal of information about Degas’ photographs, much of it in the exhibition’s illustrated catalog. Among other things, the essayists contend that Degas’ photographic techniques were determined by the effects he hoped to achieve rather than the methods favored by other artists.

Instead of using the camera to produce pictures spontaneously, Degas worked slowly and exercised complete control, directing the poses and expressions of his sitters and choosing their settings. When other photographers were eagerly adapting to hand-held cameras and film, Degas continued to use glass plates and to set up his camera on a tripod.

Indeed, he had no interest in grabbing shots on the run. “Speed, speed, is there nothing more stupid?” he reportedly asked a friend. His surviving photographs suggest that his favorite subjects were friends who willingly sat still in their living rooms for long exposures. But if his photographs resemble old-fashioned camera work, it’s not because he clung to traditional methods.

“He infused his portraits with a liveliness and a sense of experiment that is similar to his work in other materials,” said Weston Naef, the Getty’s curator of photographs. “He began to do with photographs what was not commonly done. For example, he began to make enlargements from small parts of negatives when the standard way of working was to print the negative in its full form, as a contact print,” Naef said.

“He also gave himself over to all aspects of the process, using lighting that was somewhat crude. He used a magnesium flash that would have scared the pants off his sitters. He experimented with oil lamps, gas lamps, almost always choosing a single source of light, rather than trying to fill in, in a natural way. He knew that he was being unprofessional by using light the way he did, but because of his nature as a highly experimental artist, there was nothing to restrain him from trying something that might be a failure.”

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For Naef, the exhibition fulfills a dream that began about 25 years ago, when he was a young curator in the department of prints and photographs at the Met. In his early days there, he shared an office with veteran curator A. Hyatt Mayor, who had the then-unusual practice of acquiring copy prints of artworks for the museum as well as original fine art prints.

Mayor recognized the value of “reproductive prints” that provided a way, before the advent of photography, for the public to become familiar with original artworks, Naef said. Traditional methods of printmaking had been used for this purpose since the Renaissance. When copy photographs replaced engravings and lithographs, they became part of the Met’s collection too.

“Hyatt Mayor brought to photography a respect for the power of the photograph to simply copy an original,” Naef said. “My introduction to Degas as photographer was not through original photographs--the original prints that are now acknowledged to be rare and sometimes unique examples of his work--but rather through black-and-white copies made by other people.”

Naef’s interest in Degas was kindled by the strength of the Met’s holdings of the artist’s work. “The Met has wonderful paintings, wonderful drawings, wonderful prints. And it had these replica photographs. I thought it was ironic in a museum context, where there were such extraordinary holdings of authentic works, that there were only copies of the photographs. So I set as a modest mission to have at least one original Degas photograph enter the collection. It was practically the last curatorial action that I took before I departed and came to the Getty in 1984,” he said.

The Met purchased “Paul Poujaud, Marie Fontaine, and Degas,” an image of three friends lounging and conversing in a parlor, below a large wall mirror that reflects a light fixture and interior spaces. It was the first original photograph by Degas in the collection of an American museum.

But Naef brought his interest in Degas to the Getty, which now has more Degas photographs than any other American museum--six works by the artist alone and one image done in collaboration with Walter Barnes.

Once that small group of works was in place, Naef resolved to organize an exhibition of all the known photographs by Degas. He presented the idea to Maria Hambourg, his counterpart at the Met, who agreed, and, in due time, Daniel took charge of the show.

“I guess every curator who changes jobs carries some baggage,” Naef said. “But at some point, when you have so many opportunities to do different things and you realize you can’t do everything, you have to give up some things that are very close to your heart. I knew when I began talking to Malcolm [Daniel] that he would have the tenacity and the interest to carry this through in a way that was going to be superlative. It’s just wonderful to see a project that has been in the back of my mind for such a long time unfold in such a delightful way.”

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“Edgar Degas, Photographer,” J. Paul Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Drive. Opens Tuesday. Regular schedule: Tuesdays-Wednesdays, 11 a.m.-7 p.m.; Thursdays-Fridays, 11 a.m.-9 p.m; Saturdays-Sundays, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Ends March 28. Free; parking reservations required. (310) 440-7300.