SHADOWY ORIGINS
A friend, a painter, was eager to see the Degas show at MoMA, A Strange New Beauty, because she finds him “incredibly modern.” The monotypes on display certainly are. In this printing method ink is smeared across and then removed from a metal plate, a way of image-making less belabored and more spontaneous than oil painting, where layers of slow-drying colors are built over a canvas. Perhaps Degas took to the monotype because he had a loose hand. If one looks closely, at both his prints and paintings, one sees that the human figures are modeled bluntly. Arms and legs have awkward, rubbery proportions, and sometimes end in stumps. The artist gives women faces that are unspecific, often turned, and not very pretty. Some of the prints are shockingly abstract in the uncertain boundaries between figure and ground, object and space. Degas was a nineteenth-century painter looking a century or more ahead.
Where Degas finds form precisely is in light, and it is light, not ballerinas, that is his primary subject. The women he renders in the monotypes (dancers, prostitutes, showgirls) all feel as if they’re emerging from shadow. In some instances the atmosphere is so dense, and the figures so obscured, that they look like sea creatures rising from a storm. In the monotype process, in shaping images from a spill of ink, by wiping and scraping away parts, Degas was finding form in darkness. (There’s one of Degas’ photographs on display at MoMA too, showing his interest in a technique that relies explicitly on the form-giving properties of light.) That the artist can depict the body with such specificity and charm without describing it literally speaks to his skill in modeling light. The scenes here – of theaters, cafes, bordellos, bedrooms, studios – aren’t, like the work of other Impressionists, flickering pleasurably between the figural and the abstract. They stand firmly with the abstract.