Edgar Degas, Photographer

The Metropolitan Museum's monograph Edgar Degas, Photographer was published to accompany an exhibit held in 1998 that put on display for the first time the famous artist's surviving photos.  It offered a surprising glimpse into the world of a painter whose accomplishments had for many years been considered fully known and documented.  I attended the exhibit myself and was fascinated by the manner in which Degas brought his aesthetic sensibilities to bear on a medium that was new to him and that he had only begun to explore when already in his sixties.

The full extent of Degas's activity as a photographer is not fully known and most likely never will be.  It was only after his death that the photographs were found in the studio.  At the time, they were given no value.  If any attention at all were paid to them, it was only to view them as studies for works in other media.  In contrast, Degas's forays into sculpture had also been largely unknown during his lifetime (only one had been publicly exhibited) and these pieces too were only discovered in the posthumous inventory of his studio.  But the worth of the sculptures was immediately recognized.  It was at once acknowledged that these crumbling clay figures represented an important new dimension in analyzing the artist's entire oeuvre.  Bronze castings were quickly made of those that could be salvaged and a major exhibit was held in 1918.  The photographs, on the other hand, were put aside.  Their worth unrecognized, they were widely scattered and many may have been discarded outright.  The Met exhibit represented a milestone in correcting this oversight.

The eccentric Degas was a difficult character to like.  A lifelong bachelor, he was a reactionary in his political views and in his opposition to social reform.  Most disturbing was his deep seated anti-Semitism which became particularly pronounced during the Dreyfus affair.  By the time he took up photography, his eyesight had begun to fail and he had grown increasingly isolated from those former friends and fellow artists who held much more liberal views and were appalled by his bigotry.  But whatever his personal faults, Degas was a consummate artist and was continually in search of new media with which to express his vision.  Though he had begun as a fairly traditional historical painter, he continually experimented over the course of his career not only with photography and sculpture but also with etching, lithography and the monotype.

The volume contains three informative essays.  The first, by Malcolm Daniel, is the most comprehensive and gives as full an account as possible of the history of Degas's photographic endeavors over the course of several years near the end of the nineteenth century.  The story is necessarily incomplete as so little is known of this period.  The information that is available comes primarily from the correspondence of his friend Daniel Halévy who, along with members of his family, provided the artist with his most often portrayed subjects.  Here is detailed Degas's strong predilection for low light photography as well as the tyrannical methods he used to pose his subjects for the great lengths of time needed for his long exposures.  The second essay, by Eugenia Parry, is more limited in scope and details the relationship of the photographic tableaux in which Degas posed his subjects to the larger world of theater and Parisian society itself.  (Many of Degas's acquaintances, such as Charles Haas, were later to provide Proust with models for the characters he was to describe in his great novel.)  The third essay, by Theodore Reff, is a brief account of the artist's friendship with his supplier of photographic materials, Guillaume Tasset, whose shop also processed and enlarged Degas's work.  The essay is anecdotal in style and provides a charming portrait of the forgotten art dealer who was himself an accomplished painter.

The book contains 39 plates, all of which are of excellent quality.  These include reproductions of three large format negatives which, because they were improperly processed, have grown so "colorized" over time that they have become works of art in themselves.  There is also a catalogue raisonné that details all Degas's known photographs, not just those included in the exhibit, as well as those of more uncertain provenance that have been provisionally attributed to him.  The catalogue provides what little technical data is available regarding both negatives and prints.

If the book has a major fault, it's the omission of more detailed information describing the equipment used by Degas and the materials he purchased from Tasset and used in his photographic work.  At a time when Kodak was making the snapshot a popular form among amateurs, Degas approached the medium as a professional and carefully composed all his photos.  To do this, he would necessarily have had to use a tripod-mounted view camera (the book does mention that Degas requested Tasset to cut down standard size 9x12cm Lumière panchromatic plates to 8x10cm for use in his own camera).  There is no mention, though, of the lenses or other paraphernalia  Degas had available for use.  This information would have been of great assistance to photographers seeking to better appreciate Degas's accomplishments.