Femme lisant

The motif of a woman reading was oft-used by the Impressionists, featuring in the work of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edouard Manet, and Claude Monet. Often pictured fully clothed in bust-length portraits, both in domestic interiors and in gardens, these works serve as quintessential images of this movement. In the present work, however, Edgar Degas has transformed this subject, picturing a red-headed nude outstretched upon a highly patterned divan, engrossed in a book. Presenting a moment of peaceful, private repose within the confines of a toilette or bedroom, Femme lisant was among the controversial series of bathers that Degas created in the mid-1880s. In contrast to many of these works, which show the female figure in various stages of ablution, the present work, executed circa 1883-1885, is particularly rare in its depiction of the protagonist reading.
Femme lisant is also notable for its radical pictorial construction. On an almost square format, Degas has tightly cropped this scene so as to remove most of the setting. Pictorial space is shallow, emphasized by the high back of the sofa which envelops the figure but also thrusts her to the edge of the picture plane. As a result, a sense of spatial dislocation occurs, as the viewer has to work out where they are placed in relation to the scene that lies before them. This compositional ambiguity is one of the greatest aspects of Degas’ oeuvre. Degas was a master of composition. Throughout his career, he deployed a number of artistic devices in his work—close cropping, unexpected viewpoints, and skewed perspectives, for example—to heighten often subtle relationships, dialogues, or more formal aspects of his compositions. As a result, while many of his works often appear to be spontaneous, unplanned and uncomposed, they were in fact meticulously studied and carefully conceived. This tension between artifice and naturalism lies at the heart of his oeuvre. “Art is the same word as artifice,” Degas once stated, “that is to say something deceitful. It must succeed in giving the impression of nature by false means, but it has to look true” (quoted in C. Lloyd, Edgar Degas: Drawings and Pastels, London, 2017, p. 280).
As a result of this cleverly cropped composition, in Femme lisant, the myriad lines, strokes, and patches of pastel transform this domestic interior scene into a dazzling, in places near abstract, vision of color. At the time that he executed this work, pastel was fast becoming the artist’s favored medium. “In pastel,” Richard Kendall has written, “Degas found a medium that propelled him towards extravagance, using the patient tracings of his draughtsmanship as a springboard to the ‘orgies of color’ of his final decades. Fusing tradition with violent innovation, Degas seized on pastel as the ultimate medium of his maturity, uniting in a single material the expressiveness of paint with the sparseness and precision of drawing” (Degas: Beyond Impressionism, London, 1996, p. 89). The patterned divan appears alive with layers of jewel-like color applied in striated lines. Amid this riot of color, the nude tones of the figure appear luminous, her skin iridescent, radiating from the picture plane. In many ways, the highly patterned composition prefigures the odalisques of Henri Matisse. Works such as Odalisque, harmonie rouge (1926-1927, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), similarly feature a semi-nude figure reclined upon a colorful divan, surrounded by dazzling color.
As is typical of many of Degas’ bathers, the nude figure’s physiognomy is indistinguishable, rendered as an inscrutable, shadowy blur. Save for the red hair that is piled atop her head, she remains entirely anonymous, and, thanks to her immersion in her book, her expression remains unknown to the viewer. This sense of total ambiguity as to the identity, class, occupation, and even the setting of the woman was highly radical. All sense of anecdote and narrative is absent, leaving solely a compelling exploration of the expressive possibilities of form and color, line and composition.
These aspects also heighten the sense of voyeurism that pervades these bathing scenes. In the present work, the figure shows no awareness of the viewer’s presence, alone and immersed in a private world, an inner sanctum separated from the other more public domains of the home. Critics honed in on this aspect of Degas’ nudes. “There is certainly a woman there [in Degas’ pictures],” Gustave Geffroy wrote in 1894, “but a certain kind of woman, without the expression of a face, without the wink of an eye, without the décor of the toilette, a woman reduced to the gesticulation of her limbs, to the appearance of her body, a woman considered as a female…” (quoted in J.S. Boggs, Degas, exh. cat., Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, 1988, p. 368). Or, as the artist himself put it, “Hitherto the nude has always been represented in poses which presuppose an audience, these women of mine are honest…unconcerned by any other interests than those involved in their physical condition... It is as if you looked through the keyhole” (quoted in R. Kendall, ed., Degas By Himself: Drawings, Prints, Paintings, Writings, London, 1987, p. 311).