http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/sep/30/picture-this-frances-spalding-degas?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487
What I love about Degas's Woman
at the Window (1871) is its informality. Figure and setting seem, like
something found by chance, an unposed vignette, which the artist perhaps saw in
passing, out of the corner of his eye, and which he must have registered later
in the studio, using quick touches of oil paint on paper. But this is
inaccurate.
The picture was preconceived, and a model obtained. And Degas
deliberately set out to experiment with "essence", which involves
draining paint of its oil and thinning it instead with turpentine. So the
informality, as always in Degas's paintings, is calculated. The picture must
have been begun in January 1871 because Paris was under
siege, cut off from the outside world by the Prussian army. Owing
to a shortage of food, restaurants had begun openly serving rats,
dogs, cats and horses, and the payment Degas gave his model was a hunk of meat.
Story has it that the woman was so hungry that, there and then, she ate it raw.
Nothing of this desperation is shown here.
Yet the painting itself is
not cut off from life. During the Franco-Prussian war Degas had joined the
national guard as a volunteer. In the course of rifle training he had
discovered that his eyesight was defective. From then on his eyes were a
constant source of anxiety, and when his sight worsened in old age he feared
blindness. Vision is inevitably precious to an artist who finds his
subjects in the world around him, and in Woman at the Window the
light takes on a value and importance that exceeds the norm. He may even have
dressed the sitter in black, to heighten the contrast between her and the
searing white light. Dense and opaque, the light is almost as substantial
as the seated figure. Yet because we know that light alters, fades, gives way
to darkness, we are aware, too, through their association, that the woman will
eventually move, leave the room and disappear into some other life. We are
shown a moment of rest, of stillness and reflection, yet pressing in on all
sides is a sense of transience.
Anyone who rents a flat or takes a hotel room in
Paris, or any other major city, will know the alteration caused by the act of
opening a window. The silent and often slightly stale room is suddenly invaded
by a cacophony, the noise of traffic, nearby building work, the shouts and
smells of the neighbourhood. This is the subject of Umberto Boccioni's famous
picture The Street
Enters the House, in which a woman stands on a balcony looking
down on to a busy city square. Degas's Woman at the Window is
the antithesis of this. The woman sits with her back to the window, and though
there is a slight hint of Parisian architecture it remains peripheral: the city
is out of sight, out of mind.
What primarily fascinates Degas is the contre-jour effect.
Set against the bright light, the woman's face disappears into shadow.
Admittedly, the light catches the top half of her profile, for her head is
turned away from us, but we are denied the kind of information that embodies
character and presence. However hard we peer at the picture, she remains a
cipher, a token for the solitary state.
There are many places in this picture where it
looks unfinished. Degas is painting a riposte to all the over-stuffed,
over-finished and over-fixed portraits that he would have seen annually at the
French salon where he had exhibited during the 1860s. By the 1870s he and his
friends, the impressionists, wanted to strip away tired conventions and
reintroduce vitality into painting. They also wanted to catch the intrigue of
modern life, including the most fleeting of moments. Degas was the most adept
at creating a psychologically complex space. His pupil Walter Sickert said
he learned from Degas the need for "unaccustomed points of
view". So impressed was he with Woman at the Window that
in 1902 he bought it. Unfortunately, he then varnished it and the picture
darkened. But this did not destroy its hymn to light.
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