"Edgar Degas" PDF - Fondation Beyeler

VISITORS GUIDE E
Edgar
Degas
”
”
The Late Work
FONDATION BEYELER

Edgar Degas —The Late Work
Sept. 30, 2012 —Jan. 27, 2013
CAUTION: Do not touch the works of art!
Extremely fragile paintings and sculptures are displayed in
the present exhibition. We kindly request you not to touch
the works of art under any circumstances
This symbol in the exhibition refers to works which are
commented on below. Please note the number and symbol on
the exhibit labels and the corresponding number in the text.
2

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction 4
ROOm 1 6
ROOm 2A 8
ROOm 2B 10
ROOm 3 13
ROOm 4 16
ROOm 5 18
ROOm 6 19
ROOm 7 21
ROOm 8 24
Information 26
Catalogue 27
Room Plan 28
3

INTRODUCTION
Edgar Degas—The Late Work
In an artistic career that spanned sixty years Edgar Degas
(1834–1917) produced an oeuvre far greater in size and scope
than those of such contemporaries of his as Claude Monet and
Auguste Renoir. Whereas his fellow Impressionists concentrated
almost exclusively on oil painting, Degas also created
thousands of drawings and pastels and experimented with
printing techniques. For a time he even engaged intensively
with photography. And the posthumous Exposition des sculptures
de Degas (1921) established his reputation as one of the
great painter-sculptors of the modern era.
The Fondation Beyeler’s Degas exhibition is the first ever to be
devoted exclusively to the late work. It explores in detail the
richness of the artist’s achievement in this culminating phase
of his career, beginning in the latter half of the 1880s, with
the first signs of a fundamental change in the style and content
of his work. He began to abandon the delicate, detailed handling
that had been the hallmark of his Impressionist style and
gradually stopped producing “picturesque,” genre-like images
of city life. After the eighth and last Impressionist exhibition,
in 1886, Degas turned his back on the art world and gradually
withdrew from public life. This encouraged a view of him as a
misanthropic recluse, a view still widespread today. Shielded
from the outside world, this unconventional bachelor lived in a
kind of “inner emigration,” existing for and in his art. He depicted
his principal subjects—ballet dancers and female nudes,
jockeys and racehorses, landscapes and portraits—in ever
new variations and combinations. These extensive sequences
of “serial products” embodied an innovative and prophetic
notion of the work of art: each image not only constituted a
self-sufficient (master)work; it also related to the conceptual
parameters of a constant “work in progress.” The exhibition
therefore includes examples of every technique and motif
featured in the artist’s oeuvre, presented according to their
relative importance.
4

Degas apparently created what he once called “orgies of color”
in a trancelike state in which past and present, things he remem-
bered and things he saw in front of him, merged imperceptibly
with each other. In his deliberately chosen isolation he created
one of the most compelling, almost obsessive late oeuvres in
the entire history of European art.
The exhibition has been devised by guest curator Martin
Schwander in collaboration with Michiko Kono, Associate
Curator at the Fondation Beyeler.
5

ROOm 1
1 • Danseuses au foyer, 1900−05
Dancers in the Foyer
From the early 1870s onwards, Degas concerned himself with
the motif of dancers, depicting the “ballet rats” of the Paris
Opera in a variety of situations. He employed a range of media,
experimented with materials and textures, and, in his late work,
repeatedly returned to earlier subjects, compositions and poses.
Dancers in the Foyer gives a view of the opera practice room.
In the right foreground we see three dancers in shimmering
whitish-blue tutus waiting for their cue, resting and tying their
shoes while their fellow dancers in the background have already
begun to practice their steps.
Degas unfolds a panorama, an extremely daring composition on
an extended horizontal format. The picture plane is divided in
half by a pillar extending from floor to ceiling, abruptly intersecting
the figure of the dancer in the extreme background.
This feature serves to emphasize the large space on the left
side, which is surprisingly empty. This space remains empty of
content as well, for no one is dancing there yet, an amorphous
color area made legible as the floor of the room only by a few
cast shadows. The whole scene is infused with backlighting from
the full-length windows. This blurs the contours of objects and
figures, dissolves details in shimmering masses of color which
seem to emit light in their own right.
6

ROOm 1
2 • Trois danseuses à la classe de danse, 1888−1890
Three Dancers at a Dancing Class
One idiosyncracy of Degas’s ballet pictures is the fact that they
hardly ever represent the moment of dancing itself. Instead,
his observant eye focuses on the dancers’ behavior before and
after the performance—scenes normally never witnessed by
the audience: the girls holding their weary heads, yawning,
their shoulders drooping, hastily tying their ballet shoes,
scratching and prinking. These gestures tell of the opposite
side of the ballet spectacle and its pretty dancers—the
hard training required of the girls, who often come from the
lower social strata and earn their living this way. They appear
exhausted, sometimes bored, and let themselves go—a crass
contrast to the highly disciplined movements dancing on stage
demand.
The arrangement of figures in Three Dancers at a Dancing
Class is found in a similar form in many of Degas’s dance
depictions. Even the dancer standing in the middle ground,
arm resting on her hip and holding a fan, occurs in several
compositions. The rhythmical sequence of individual movements,
from lowered, raised and profile heads, extended or
bent arms and legs, can be read as a choreography of limbs
that has the effect of an alternative dance performance, just
as compelling as the aesthetic of the dance itself.
7

ROOm 2A
3 • Danseuse russe, c. 1895
Russian Dancer
Degas experts have long discussed the precise sequence of the
total of fourteen pastels and five drawings of Russian dancers,
and also the reason for the artist’s interest in this particular
motif. Today most believe that these works emerged around
1900. Whether or not Degas was inspired by performances
of a Russian folk dance group that appeared in 1895 at the
Folies-Bergère, cannot be precisely established. Whatever the
case, this charcoal and pastel drawing represents a highly
unusual version of the artist’s favorite theme, because here,
the figures are actually dancing.
The women in folk costume dance ecstatically, their skirts
and sleeves swirling, arms and legs flying through the air.
The black charcoal drawing establishes the pose of the two
dancers and their movements, and pastels are used to add a
strong color chord of red, blue and greenish-yellow.
The young Henri Matisse was likely fascinated by Degas’s
images of dancing groups in open, well-nigh amorphous
settings. It is very probable that he saw them in the master’s
studio and that they inspired his monumental painting
The Dance, done just less than ten years later (now in the
Museum of Modern Art, New York).
8

ROOm 2A
4 • Trois danseuses (jupes bleues, corsages rouges), c. 1903
Three Dancers (Blue Tutus, Red Bodices)
This pastel from the Beyeler Collection shows three dancers
standing in a row in the wings, waiting for their cue to go on
stage, behind the wall of the set. Degas connects the individual
figures by means of a rhythmical sequence of limbs, forming a
chain that extends horizontally along the landscape scene. This
results in a visual interlocking of the dancers’ gestures and
poses into a single movement. The girls have similar faces and
costumes, and their features are not individualized. This leads
to a well-nigh cinematic effect, the impression that this is
a flowing sequence of the motions of one and the same figure,
in which the culmination of one figure’s gestures marks the
beginning of the next figure’s partial motion.
In addition, Degas blends the separate segments of the picture
space. The silhouettes of the dancers in the foreground and the
materials and patterns of their costumes are interwoven with
the painted landscape on the set behind them. The rendering
of the figures seems hardly more realistic than the painted
scene, which in turn is distinguished as a painted rather than
real forest only by the shadow cast by the hand of a girl resting
on it. All of the forms and colors, animate and inanimate
things, lead a life of their own and combine to form a highly
artificial visual world. The present pastel is typical of Degas’s
late compositions with dancers, in which fragments of scenes
often appear to be excerpted set pieces that cut off the picture
space.
9

ROOm 2B
5 • Etude de nu pour une danseuse à la barre, 1895−98
Study of a Nude for a Dancer at the Barre
This work on paper is a preparatory study intended to establish
the motif and pose of a dancer by means of a nude model. The
pastel-tinted charcoal drawing compellingly proves that Degas
was the only painter in the Impressionist circle who throughout
his life based his work on traditional methods of image-making
such as careful preliminary sketching. The female nude has
placed her left leg on the practice barre and lissomly bends
her upper body forwards. Her right hand grasps her ankle in
order to increase the tension. Degas corrected the pose several
times, as seen from the blurred charcoal lines.
Free, gestural vertical and horizontal hatchings in orange and
red pastel suggest wall and floor as points of spatial orientation.
The woman’s facial features are undefined, as is her light-brown,
gathered-up hair. Despite its reduced means, the drawing
reflects an enormous presence and luminosity.
6 • Danseuses à la barre, c. 1900
Dancers at the Barre
The physical exertions of dancers were closely involved with
Degas’s own work on his pictures. Only by continually challenging
himself and searching for new perspectives, poses and
figure arrangements and experimenting with them, was he
able to achieve the perfection that amounts to true mastery.
This included self-discipline and a devotion to art—traits
shared by the hardworking dancers in order to shine on stage
and convey the beauty and grace of the dance to the audience.
Danseuses à la Barre is based on the preparatory study of a
nude just discussed (5 •) and reflects the development of the
visual idea using a fully dressed model. Degas added a further
figure to the composition, who likewise grasps the barre that
runs diagonally along the wall and into the depths of the
picture. This dancer is depicted from the back, turning her
10

ROOm 2B
head into a profile view, as if her pose were a mirror image
of the body and head positions of her fellow dancer on the
right. The girls’ light-blue tutus are cut off at the picture edge,
yet link the two torsos striving in opposite directions into a
harmonious, sweeping curve.
7 • Danseuses, 1900−05
Dancers
The Degas catalogue raisonné lists a total of seven pastels on
the subject of dancers at rest. All of these are dated to 1896
and evince similar dimensions and compositions, although
their color schemes differ. The low bench appears in many
of Degas’s images of dancers, and very likely belonged to the
furnishings of his studio.
The two dancers have seated themselves on a bench behind
the scenes, apparently in order to rest between appearances.
Their poses reflect great weariness. These poses stand in strong
contrast to the intense colors of their costumes and the entire
pictorial space. The bright orange tutus contain hints of
the greenish, shimmering floor, and the dancers’ complexion
is sprinkled with lilac-colored dots of pastel. One has the
impression that their silhouettes dissolve into the scene
painting behind them and merge with the depiction of trees,
branches and foliage to form a nearly abstract whole.
11

ROOm 2B
8 • Deux danseuses au repos, c. 1898
Two Dancers Resting
This is one of a series of Degas’s pastels that exhibit highly
intense colors. As in many of the other work groupings in the
exhibition, in the late 1880s the artist began to repeat in
variation after variation the type of composition and the poses
of the individual figures. By comparison to Danseuses (7 •),
the contours and outlines are more clearly defined here, and
certain passages are distinguished from one another in terms
of material texture. As if submerged in a sea of luminous blue
tulle, the dancers’ torsos shine out of their puffed tutus. The
bare skin of their shoulders and arms shimmers in a porcelain
white before passing to the pale pink of their stockings and
ballet shoes.
9 • Danseuses sur la scène, c. 1889
Dancers on the Stage
More strongly than the previously discussed ballet pictures,
this oil conveys an impression of the stage and painted backdrops
of the Paris Opera. Five dancers in white tutus are visible
in the right foreground, at the edge of the stage near a bench.
Rather than dancing, they wait to be auditioned, rest, grasp
their ankle, stretch, or practice certain poses. Artificial stage
lighting falls on them like a spotlight, picking out the skin of
their bare shoulders and the tulle of the tutus.
Though they concentrate on the practice session, Degas shifts
this to the extreme left background. There we see the blue-clad
figure of the dancing master in front of two schematically
rendered ballet girls. The heads and bodies of the figures in
the foreground are focused entirely on this point, establishing
a diagonal sightline from right to left and into the background.
The composition is augmented by the landscape scene of a
slightly declining, hilly mountain chain and a blue sky which
terminates the picture at the back.
12

ROOm 3
10 • Henri Rouart et son fils Alexis, 1895−98
Henri Rouart and His Son Alexis
This double portrait of Henri Rouart and his eldest son, Alexis,
is one of the great, ambitious visual projects in Degas’s late
oeuvre. Henri Rouart, a mechanical engineer and passionate
collector of contemporary artists such as Millet, Corot, Daumier
and Manet, was a close friend of Degas’s from their schooldays.
The artist spent about three years making studies of the two
figures for his portrait in oils.
It is striking how emotionally detached father and son appear
here. Henri is depicted as a fragile, carelessly shaven elderly
man with reddened eyes, leaning on his walking stick even
when seated, his head turned seemingly absent-mindedly to
the left. Alexis stands in coat and bowler hat to the left and
behind his father, gazing past us out of the picture. Although
Alexis’s upright figure occupies a great deal of space next to
his father’s hunched form, his gaze is insecure, and the way
he removes his gloves appears awkward. It would seem that
Degas, then in his early sixties, was thinking about aging
—physical aging in the form of illness and infirmity, but also
mental aging caused by loneliness and disappointment. At the
same time, Degas’s enormous powers of observation give us
an idea of the intimate, often sensitive relationships between
human beings, which he has visually expressed with great
compassion.
13

ROOm 3
11 • Autoportrait avec La Femme qui pleure
d’Albert Bartholomé, c. 1895
Self-Portrait with Bartholomé’s “La Femme qui pleure”
In the 1890s Degas began to concern himself with the potentials
of photography, and portrayed friends and acquaintances who
sat for him. He also made a series of self-portrait photographs.
For the development and enlargement of the negatives, he
usually relied on his friend Guillaume Charles Tasset. In this
image, Degas poses leaning far back in an armchair. His head
is turned to strict profile, his hand on his chin in the attitude of
a thinker. Visible behind him is a plaster sculpture by his friend,
the sculptor Albert Bartholomé. Both the artist’s head and
the sculpture of a crouching nude are precisely illuminated.
Beginning with the patterned upholstery at the right edge, the
suggestion of a diagonal leads to the left and into the depths.
In addition, the dark room is artfully divided by vertical bands
of light and shadow.
The technical possibilities of photography were still quite limited
in the mid 19th century. Only small-format prints could be made,
whose halftones varied from black to gradations of grey to
white. Instantaneous photography, which emerged between
1868 and 1871, enabled a reduction of the exposure time to
1/50th of a second and the capturing of motion. The disadvantage,
however, was that the earliest instantaneous cameras
required an especially short focus, which frequently led to
distorted perspectives in the image. As photographing was
possible only with an open lens, the motif usually appeared
underexposed or blurred. Perhaps this was the reason Degas
used older cameras with very long exposures times, which
forced the model to sit motionlessly for several minutes.
14

ROOm 3
12 • Danseuse, le bras tendu, taken 1895/96
Dancer, Arm Outstretched
Danseuse ajustant sa bretelle, taken 1895/96
Dancer Adjusting Her Shoulder Strap
When he turned to the new medium of photography in the
1890s, not surprisingly Degas took pictures of dancers as well
as other subjects. A series of photographs taken in his studio
shows the same girl in different poses and from different points
of view, like those that occur in the pastels: She stretches out
her arms or adjusts her shoulder strap, rotating around her
own axis.
Degas experimented with various lighting effects and mani-
pulated the prints of his photos. He must have found the
reversal of the original light-dark values in the negatives
especially intriguing. An amateur photographer, Degas was
especially interested in the graphic potentials of the technique;
in photography, light itself becomes the draftsman. His
experiments are closely related to those done in printmaking,
especially monotype, a process that as a rule permits only a
single impression to be made.
15

ROOm 4
13 • Femme à sa toilette, c. 1894
Woman at Her Toilette
Degas’s pastels of women washing and drying themselves and
combing their hair are among the outstanding achievements
in his oeuvre. The intimate toilette scenes obviously broke with
the tradition of depicting the female nude as an ideal of beauty.
Not the women but the pictures of them were to show their
best side. The sumptuously colored Woman at Her Toilette
depicts a nude woman from the back, seated on a chair and
drying her neck with a towel. At first sight, the countless lines
and patterns of pastel strokes set next to and over each other
seem confusing. These visually weave the separate elements
together and create the effect of a highly condensed space in
which the things depicted are recognizable only on second
glance: for instance, the small, light-colored dog in the lower
right corner, which we might mistake for a towel or article of
clothing.
14 • La Coiffure, 1886−1890
Woman Combing Her Hair
Most of Degas’s pastels are based on a charcoal drawing, in this
case providing an exciting contrast to the colors. The complex
pose, with crossed legs, slightly rotated torso, bent head, and
raised, angled arms is treated with great realism. The colorful
high point of the composition is formed by the woman’s
carmine-red slippers—an indication of the intimate boudoir
atmosphere.
16

ROOm 4
15 • Femme s’essuyant les cheveux, 1888−1890
Woman Drying Her Hair
Views of nude female figures after the bath form one of the most
thoroughly pursued themes in Degas’s late work. He studied them
in oil paintings, pastels and sculptures. The present unusually
large-format charcoal drawing shows a woman sitting on a
low upholstered seat. Turned away from us in a three-quarter
back view, she bends forward to dry her wet hair with a towel,
resting her right arm on her hip.
This study formed the basis for a whole series of further pictures,
which show the same motif in oils or pastels. The fact that Degas’s
repeated compositions are nevertheless freshly fascinating
lies in the artist’s unique handling of diverse materials, and
his masterly employment of colors and illumination to evoke
volumes on the plane. In 1886, Degas wrote to his friend
Bartholomé, “… you must rework the same subject ten, one
hundred times. Nothing in art should resemble an accident,
not even movement.”
17

ROOm 5
16 • Femme à sa toilette, c. 1892
Woman at Her Toilette
Here the woman stands bent over a washbasin, washing her
left armpit with a sponge. The viewer has the role of a voyeur of
this intimate situation who observes the anonymous woman
from a safe hiding place. This was much the way Degas’s
contemporaries felt when, at the eighth and last of the Impres-
sionist exhibitions, he showed several scenes of women at
their toilette.
The artist confirmed this impression when he explained to
the author George Moore, “In the past, the nude has always
been represented in poses that presuppose an audience,
but my women are simple creatures. I show them without
coquettishness, like animals that are cleaning themselves […]
It is as if you were looking through the keyhole.”
18

ROOm 6
17 • Chevaux de courses, 1884
Jockeys on Horseback
The motif of horses suffuses Degas’s oeuvre in diverse media. It
began with oil paintings, which were continually accompanied
by graphic and printmaking techniques such as drawing and
monotype, influenced his involvement with sculpture, and
ended in the late pastels. In other words, a considerable part
of his work was devoted to the subject of horses and jockeys
in motion, the extent of which was surpassed only by Degas’s
pictures of the dance and female nudes.
Like the gaze the artist directed into ballet rooms and behind
the opera scenes, capturing the dancers practicing or preparing
for their entry, from the early 1860s he observed jockeys riding
on Parisian racecourses. The groups of mounted jockeys also
appeared in the same arrangment in pastels as well. It is
remarkable how Degas embeds the figures, perfectly modelled
in light and shade, in comparatively amorphous landscapes.
The horses’ bodies, shining with sweat, and the riders’ jerseys
glowing in the sunlight are arranged as if on a painted backdrop
on which the legs and hooves perform dynamic, dancelike
steps.
18 • Cheval marchant au pas relevé, modelled in the
early 1870s
Horse Walking
His small statuettes/sculptures of women, dancers and horses
were valuable instruments for the artist, scaled-down models
he could study and render from every angle. The sculpture
of the trotting horse on view here can be rediscovered in a
number of Degas’s pictures. It was part of an elaborate working
process that extended over several decades and included the
most diverse media, from drawing and painting to sculpture.
19

ROOm 6
19 • Le Vésuve, c. 1892
Vesuvius
As a painter of modern life in the big city of Paris, opera
dancers and scenes from cafés and racecourses, Degas took
his undisputed place in European art history. Less well known
are the compelling landscapes whose approach tended in the
direction of abstraction. In memory of the artist’s frequent
stays in Naples, he created this small-format monotype with
Mt. Vesuvius as the central motif. The lineature is relaxed, and
the blurred contours of the various areas seem to intermerge.
The free play of mass and volume, light and color, appear to
have supplanted the more graphic approach of the 1870s.
Degas showed this landscape study, printed in oils and worked
over with pastels, in his first and only one-man show in Paris,
“Paysages de Degas,” in autumn 1892 at Galerie Durand-Ruel.
A large part of the studies on view there were based on
impressions of a trip to Burgundy in 1890, captured in fleeting
sketches and notations. Back in his Paris studio, he worked up
these recollections. Degas’s monotypes of the 1890s emerged
as if in a dreamlike state in which things seen in the past and
recalled in the present merged.
In a letter of December 1892, the artist stated, “At Durand-
Ruel I have made a show that was small but advantageous to
me, with 26 imaginative landscapes.” Camille Pissarro wrote to
his son about this one-man show, “Degas mounted an exhibition
of landscapes: pastel sketches. They look like colored impressions,
very strange, a bit slipshod, but really fine in tone. ... They are
truly good works.”
20

ROOm 7
20 • Femme se lavant la jambe gauche, deuxième étude,
modelled 1890–1900
Woman Washing Her Left Leg (second study)
After Degas’s death in September 1917, the art dealer Paul
Durand-Ruel made a list of all of the works left behind in his
studio. This served as the basis for four great studio auctions
held in Paris in 1918 and 1919. Over 150 wax sculptures
of female nudes in every imaginable pose, horses depicted
in various gaits, and portraits were found in Degas’s studio,
scattered around the premises and in part heavily damaged.
Seventy-three of these miniature/little sculptures were selected
and passed on for restoration to the sculptor Bartholomé, a
friend of Degas. In 1919, bronze casts were made in order
to preserve them for posterity. The bronze pieces with their
expressive, agitated surface modelling tend to make us forget
that they were not intended for public display, and never
would have entered the art trade during the artist’s lifetime.
21 • Le Petit Déjeuner après le bain, 1895−98
Breakfast after the Bath
This pastel from the Beyeler Collection was one of the points
of departure for our extensive show of Degas’s late work, and
at the same time a masterpiece of composition, comprising a
dense structure of figures, space and color. It shows an anonymous
nude woman from the back, climbing awkwardly out of
the tub, supporting herself on a chair with her left hand as she
draws her right leg not exactly elegantly over the rim. A servant
girl stands at the ready with a cup. Her head is abruptly cut off
by the upper edge of the picture. Degas repeated and varied
this scene many times, especially in the 1890s.
21

ROOm 7
22 • La Sortie du bain, c. 1895
Leaving the Bath
Degas devoted numerous drawings, one sculpture, and several
pastels to the motif of a nude woman seated beside a bathtub,
raising her left arm to dry underneath it. As in most of the
artist’s nudes, the woman’s face is not recognizable here,
being obscured by the raised arm. The diagonally placed tub
closes off the pictorial space at the back. The oval edge of the
tub at the left appears to reply to the bent back and buttocks,
setting a compositional counterweight to the volumes of the
woman’s body.
The piled hair and woman’s silhouette are carefully modelled,
yet the figure occupies a space with hardly any recognizable
up and down, front and back. The tub and slippers seem
submerged in a sea of green and violet dots of color. Large
swathes of cloth in strong magenta and delicate pink fall
behind the tub and intersect the pattern of the wallpaper,
which consists of a network of uncountable orange, yellow
and green lines.
22

ROOm 7
23 • Après le bain, femme s’essuyant, c. 1896
After the Bath, Woman Drying Herself
Degas’s oeuvre includes three oil paintings that show a female
nude from the back, leaning against the arm of a chair. There are
also several charcoal drawings and a photograph of this subject.
The oils in the present version are so thinly applied that the
canvas even shows through in a few places. The pictorial space
is rendered in a range of gradations of a nearly monochrome
red. Even the back of the light-toned figure seems to contain
reflected accents of this basic hue.
The painting demonstrates Degas’s experiments with the
underpainting techniques of Venetian Renaissance painting,
to which he devoted himself intensively in his early work but
also in his late phase. The point was not to translate a female
nude into a classical oil painting, but the effects that could
be achieved through paint application and its various textures.
This may explain why Degas purposely left the picture in an
“unfinished” state.
23

ROOm 8
24 • Femme s’essuyant les cheveux, 1900−05
Woman Drying Her Hair
A woman’s hair as a symbol of her beauty is a motif that has
fascinated artists from time immemorial. Degas, too, repeatedly
depicted the motif of combing and arranging the hair—often
from the same point of view. This pastel of a woman seen
from the back, bending over to dry her hair, is likely the most
abstract and compelling in color of the great range of pictures
with this motif. The color composition is reduced to reds,
oranges and yellows. The color values blend in diverse nuances
and make the woman’s hair, skin and the entire picture
space appear to glow from within.
25 • Deux femmes au bain, c. 1895
Two Women at Their Bath
The motif of two nude women on a river bank belongs to a
series of several pictures in which Degas concerned himself
with nudes bathing in the open air. The present pastel consists
of three sheets of paper, subsequently mounted on heavier
cardboard. Like silhouettes, the contours of the two figures
contrast with the color areas of the surroundings—the blue
of the water, the green of the field, the white and red of the
towels. Quite possibly Cézanne’s famous depictions of bathers
inspired Degas to treat this subject, because the emergence
of the series coincided with his acquisition of two Cézanne
paintings of bathers.
24

ROOm 8
26 • Jockey blessé, 1896−98
The Fallen Jockey
The Fallen Jockey is one of the most remarkable paintings in
Degas’s late work. Not only its unusual format has a disturbing
effect but its “rough” treatment and the subject of failure. The
depiction of the leaping horse and the rider lying as if dead on
the grassy hill relates to a picture conceived in 1866, a full
three decades earlier. Repetitions of motifs, variations and
reworkings were key features of Degas’s approach. In his late
phase, the artist concerned himself increasingly with “picturemaking”
per se and aimed less at creating a perfect and selfcontained
work of art.
How should the time sequence of the scene be understood in
The Fallen Jockey? Was the jockey thrown when jumping an
obstacle, and is his horse now leaping over his body? Rather
than the race, Degas makes the fallen jockey the true subject
of the picture. Neither the precise circumstances that led to
the fall nor its consequences are addressed. The only “story”
told is that of a jockey who has failed to complete a race. There
is no succession of events, no before and after in the scene,
which appears frozen in time. The lighting makes the horse
appear like a dark, ghostly creature, while the jockey’s body is
brightly illuminated. The result is a compelling evocation of
the precariousness of life and failure of human efforts.
25

INFORmATION
Notes: Sonja Maria Krämer
Editing: Stefanie Bringezu, Daniel Kramer, Janine Schmutz
Translation: John William Gabriel
We look forward to hearing your feedback at
fondation@fondationbeyeler.ch
www.fondationbeyeler.ch/news
www.facebook.com/FondationBeyeler
twitter.com/Fond_Beyeler
FONDATION BEYELER
Baselstrasse 101, CH-4125 Riehen/Basel, Switzerland
www.fondationbeyeler.ch
26

CATALOGUE
The exhibition Edgar Degas—The Late Work is accompanied
by a catalogue from Hatje Cantz Verlag. It includes a foreword
by Sam Keller and Martin Schwander, an interview with the
artist Jeff Wall, and essays by Carol Armstrong, Jonas Beyer,
Richard Kendall, Martin Schwander, and Mareike Wolf-Scheel.
268 pages, 232 illustrations, CHF 68.
ANSICHTEN No. 8: Edgar Degas
24 pages, A4 format, numerous color illustrations, CHF 15.
The periodical ANSICHTEN (VIEWS) is designed for teachers
and art lovers.
Further publications on Degas are available from our Art Shop:
www.fondationbeyeler.ch/artshop
27

Art Shop
Entrance Museum
Foyer
Edgar Degas
3
2
1
Collection
Calder Gallery
1
2A 2B
4
7
8
6
Rothko Room
Pop Art Design
7
6
5
8 9
10
5
4 3
Video Winter Garden Lift
Souterrain (lower floor)
BEYELER COLLECTION and works from the DAROS COLLECTION
BEYELER COLLECTION and works from the VITRA DESIGN MUSEUM
Edgar Degas—The Late Work
CAUTION: Do not touch the works of art!
Extremely fragile paintings and sculptures are displayed
in the present exhibition. We kindly request you
not to touch the works of art under any circumstances.