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heterosexual and so women amazed him more than men, and amazement is what prompted his kind of drawing.
    Straightaway there were people who complained that the bodies he depicted were deformed, ugly, bestial, contorted. They even went so far as to assert that he hated those he drew!
    This misunderstanding arose because he disregarded the conventions of physical beauty as conventionally transmitted by art or literature. And, for many viewers, the more a body is naked, the more it should be clothed in convention, the more it should fit a norm, either a perverse or an idealised one; the naked have to wear the uniform of a regiment! Whereas Degas, starting from his amazement, wanted each profile of the particular body he was remembering, or watching, to surprise, to be improbable, for only then would its uniqueness become palpable.
    Degas’ most beautiful works are indeed shocking, for they begin and end with the commonplace – with what Wendy Lesser calls ‘the dailiness’ of life – and always they find there something unpredictable and stark. And in this starkness is a memory of pain or of need.
    There is a statuette of a masseuse massaging the leg of a reclining woman which I read, in part, as a confession. A confession, not of his failing eyesight, nor of any suppressed need to paw women, but of his fantasy, as an artist, of alleviating by touching – even if the touch was that of a stick of charcoal on tracing paper. Alleviating what? The fatigue to which all flesh is heir …
    Many times he stuck additional strips of paper on to his drawings because, master that he was, he lost control of them. The image led him further than he calculated going, led him to the brink, where he momentarily gave way to the other. All his late works of women appear unfinished, abandoned. And, as with the bronze horses, we can see why: at a certain instant the artist disappeared and the model entered. Then he desired no more, and he stopped.
    When the model ‘entered’, the hidden became as present on the paper as the visible. A woman, seen from the back, dries her foot which is posed on the edge of a bath. Meanwhile the invisible front of her body is also there, known, recognised, by the drawing.
    A feature of Degas’ late works is how the outlines of bodies and limbs are repeatedly and heavily worked. And the reason is simple: on the edge (at the brink), everything on the other, invisible, side is crying out to be recognised and the line searches … until the invisible comes in.
    Watching the woman standing on one leg and drying her foot, we are happy for what has been recognised and
admitted.
We feel the existent recalling its own Creation, before there was any fatigue, before the first brothel or the first spa, before the solitude of narcissism, at the moment when the constellations were given names. Yes, this is what we sense watching her keeping her balance.
    So what did he leave behind, if it wasn’t finished masterpieces?
    Do we not all dream of being known, known by our backs, legs, buttocks, shoulders, elbows, hair? Not psychologically recognised, not socially acclaimed, not praised, just nakedly known. Known as a child is by its mother.
    One might put it like this. Degas left behind something very strange. His name. His name, which, thanks to the example of his drawings, can now be used as a verb. ‘Degas me. Know me like that! Recognise me, dear God! Degas me.’

8
Drawing: Correspondence with Leon Kossoff

    Dear Leon,
I still remember clearly the first time I visited you in your studio, or the room you were then using as a studio. It was some 40 years ago. I remember the debris and the omnipresent hope. The hope was strange because its nature was that of a bone, buried in the earth by a dog.
    Now the bone is unburied and the hope has become an impressive, achievement. Except that the last word is wrong, don’t you think? To hell with achievement and its recognition, which always comes too late. But a hope of redemption