The other day, I was watching The Thomas Crown Affair, and in a museum scene, I glimpsed a familiar statue in the corner of the screen. I realized that I had been given a bronze cast of the same statue a long time ago, and after a little research, I found out it was Edgar Degas’ Little Dancer Aged Fourteen. This led to a dive into reacquainting myself with Degas’ work, which led to an overwhelming desire to know the answer to this question: What’s up with Degas’ obsession with bathing women? For reference, these are some of Degas’ bathing paintings:
It wasn’t the obsession with naked women that made me curious; it was the specific obsession with bathing. It was an oddly specific subject matter. And so I commenced my research.
Degas was an influential artist during his time, but as he shifted his focus from ballet dancers to increasingly intimate scenes (i.e. the bathers), he was met with scrutiny. Scholars have speculated that since the viewer is supposed to view the painting through a “keyhole”—the female subject does not know she is being viewed—male spectators were uncomfortable, and took it out on Degas. More recently, Degas has been accused of misogynism. A lot of people view these paintings as a debasement of women who suffer under the voyeuristic, unwelcome male gaze. They accuse Degas of prying in on women’s privacy under the safety of distance, and criticize him for forcing them in the same uncomfortable position.
Griselda Pollock writes: “As a woman viewer, I am forced to take up the proffered sadistic masculine position and symbolically enact the violence of Degas’ representations, or identify masochistically with the bizarrely posed and cruelly drawn bodies […] which in social exchange he debased and abused, and which in aesthetic practice he punished and tortured.”
At the time of the paintings’ composition, spectators thought the women in them were ugly and intentionally malformed. They were used to seeing careful poses and regal postures. But in the paintings, the bathers were captured in movement. They were simply going about their business, and Degas captured them candidly. Thus, sometimes some features were blurry or covered in shadow, and Degas’ audience thought they were deformed.
Degas’ audience also thought the bathers were prostitutes, as no other woman would allow themselves to be seen and painted naked. Prostitutes of the time also bathed a lot more often than gentlewomen because of state regulations on registered prostitutes. Of course, people of the time period did not understand why such “lowly” figures should be displayed in artwork. They thought it vulgar and didn’t want to witness such debasement.
The women who modeled for Degas’ bathing portraits very well may have been prostitutes. As a bachelor, Degas may not have had the opportunity to see proper ladies in their toilette. But there is also evidence that Degas traced his bathers from pictures given to him. In other words, he may not have been painting from life, and those models could have been anyone. The question is whether Degas meant the bathers to be perceived as prostitutes by Degas’ audience.
When we compare the bathers to Degas’ brothel paintings, we see some stark differences. The prostitutes in the brothel paintings obviously know they are being seen. They usually have some sort of adornment (jewelry, a choker, etc.), and they are stiffer than the bathers, some posing to show their body off to advantage. There is a level of self-consciousness about them. Compare the woman in “Waiting” with the woman in “Retiring.” The woman in “Waiting” is more likely a sex worker. She’s wearing a choker, she seems to be anticipating someone else’s arrival in bed, she seems alert rather than retiring, and the painting is titled “Waiting.” Also note the adornment of the women in “The Festival of the Owner” in the picture below.
Considering these differences, I do not think Degas wanted his audience to immediately assume his bathers were prostitutes. I think instead he wanted to capture something that the public sphere didn’t want to admit existed: unaffected gentlewomen naked for their own sake, and not for men.
Degas was often pushing boundaries by using unconventional subjects and revealing societal taboos in a beautiful, artistic light. For example, Degas’ model for Little Dancer Aged Fourteen was an “opera rat” who joined the Paris Opera Ballet to escape poverty. A lot of the ballerinas were sexually manipulated by the male patrons of the Ballet, and sex work may have been inescapable for a lot of the dancers. In many of Degas’ paintings of ballerinas, we can see dark male-like figures lurking in the background, ogling the dancers. In capturing a subject as beautiful as a dance, Degas also made sure to capture the darkness lurking nearby.
Disgust was the overwhelming reception to Little Dancer Aged Fourteen. The sculpture didn’t display an idealized woman that they were used to seeing cast in marble. Instead, it was a street urchin cast in beeswax and other everyday products. In the sculpture, the dancer’s head is raised in defiance and confidence, her foot is held out in a dancer’s pose—she isn’t curled into herself or hiding from anyone. Her back is arched and her arms seem to be in a somewhat uncomfortable position. She’s aware of being seen.
Charles Harrison comments: “What Degas’ pictures make clear is that whatever the prostitutes are doing in them, even if they are literally doing nothing, they are always and everywhere available to be looked at.” Instead of participating in this exploitive voyeurism, I think Degas was providing a commentary on the darkness lingering in their society which most people chose to ignore.
Diego Martelli, a friend of Degas, condemned marriage as the ultimate form of prostitution. At the time, marriage could be oppressive for women who may have been seen only as a child-making machine or an object of pleasure. If Degas agreed with his friend, his view of a woman’s situation was abysmal. In his eyes, women were treated like objects to own, only existing for man’s pleasure.
It’s easy to see how Degas would have been fascinated by the self-possession of a woman bathing, only existing for herself.
I rather like the argument that through painting the bathers, Degas was responding to the French feminist movement of the time. In her article ““The Young Spartans,” the Brothel Monotypes, and the Bathers Revisited,” Norma Broude examines Degas’ motivation and his connection with the French feminist movement. She discusses Degas’ “The Young Spartans,” which a lot of critics speculate portrays Degas’ fear of women, and a battle between men and women. However, Broude interprets that the painting portrays “not Degas’s personal fear of women as later writers have claimed, but, rather his perception of the fears of male society as a whole, as these would have been stimulated and evoked by the growing feminist movement of his period.” If you want a deeper analysis of the painting and her reasoning, I highly recommend reading her article in full.
In addition to all of my research and objective, I see something gentle in the bather paintings. I haven’t seen the painting in real life or up close to study the brushstrokes, but the lighting and the colors Degas chose tells me he viewed the women with sympathy. That being said, art is subjective and everyone interprets it in their own way—just like literature.
Bibliography:
Broude, Norma (1988) Edgar Degas and French Feminism, ca. 1880: “The Young Spartans,” the Brothel Monotypes, and the Bathers Revisited, The Art Bulletin, 70:4, 640-659, DOI: 10.1080/00043079.1988.10788599
Harrison, Charles. “Degas’ Bathers and Other People.” Modernism/modernity, vol. 6 no. 3, 1999, p. 57-90. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/mod.1999.0029.
