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underwrite their own prejudices, either misogynist or feminist. Now, eighty years after Degas stopped working, it may be time to look again at what the artist left behind. Not as insured masterpieces – the market value of his work has long been established – but as an aid to living.
    Pragmatically. Between 1866 and 1890 he made a number of small bronzes of horses. All of them reveal an intense and lucid observation. Nobody before – not even Géricault – had rendered horses with such a masterly naturalism and fluency. But around 1888 a qualitative change takes place. The style remains exactly the same, but the energy is different. And the difference is flagrant. Any child would spot it immediately. Only some art moralists might miss it. The early bronzes are of horses seen, marvellously seen, out there in the passing, observable world. The later ones are of horses, not only observed but quiveringly perceived from within. Their energy has not just been noted, but submitted to, undergone, borne, as though the sculptor’s hands had felt the terrible nervous energy of the horse in the clay he was handling.
    The date of this change coincides with Degas’ discovery of Muybridge’s photographs, which showed for the first time how the legs of horses actually moved when cantering and galloping. And Degas’ use of these photographs accords perfectly with the positivist spirit of the epoch. What brought about the
intrinsic
change, however, defies any positivism. Nature, instead of being an object of investigation, becomes a subject. The later works all seem to obey the demands of the model rather than the will of the artist!
    Yet perhaps we may be mistaken about the will of this particular artist For instance, he never expected his statues to be exhibited: they were not made to be finished and presented. His interest in them lay elsewhere.
    When Ambrose Vollard, the Impressionists’ dealer, asked Degas why he didn’t have his statuettes cast in bronze, he replied that the tin and copper alloy known as bronze was said to be eternal, and he hated nothing more than what was fixed!
    Of the seventy-four Degas sculptures that exist in bronze today, all but one were cast after his death. In many cases the original figures, modelled in clay or wax, had deteriorated and crumbled. Seventy others were too far gone to be redeemed.
    What can we deduce from this? The statuettes had already served their purpose. (Towards the end of his life Degas stopped exhibiting anything.) The statuettes were not made as sketches or preparatory studies for some other work. They were made for their own sake, yet they had served their purpose: they had reached their point of apogee and so could be abandoned.
    The apogee point for him was when the drawn entered the drawing, when the sculpted passed into the sculpture. This was the only rendezvous and transfer that interested him.
    I can’t explain how the drawn enters a drawing. I only know that it does. One gets closest to understanding this when actually drawing. On Degas’ tombstone in the cemetery of Montmartre the only words written are: ‘
Il aimait beaucoup le dessin
.’ (‘He liked drawing very much.’)
    Let us now think of the charcoal drawings, pastels, monotypes and bronzes of women. Sometimes they are presented as ballet dancers, sometimes as women at their toilette, sometimes (particularly in the monotypes) as prostitutes. Their presentation is unimportant: the ballet, the bathtub or the bordel were, for Degas, only pretexts. This is why any critical discussion about a pictorial ‘scenario’ usually misses the point. Why was Degas so fascinated by women washing themselves? Was he a keyhole voyeur? Did he consider all women tarts? (There is an excellent essay by Wendy Lesser in her book
His Other Half in
which she dismantles such questions.)
    The truth is that Degas simply invented or used any occasion to pursue his study of the human body. It was usually women’s bodies because he was