Returning the Gaze: The Confrontational Voyeurism of Edgar Degas
Words by Iris Beck
“To gaze implies more than to look at – it signifies a psychological relationship to power, in which the gazer is superior to the object of the gaze,” wrote media theorist Jonathan Schroeder on the power dynamics behind existing, positioning, and observing. The act of looking is the most functional part of visual arts, of course, yet have we become too comfortable with the audacity of gazing; too accustomed to the set roles of subject, spectator, and artist, and all or none of the power that implies?
Impressionist painter Edgar Degas presents an interesting study regarding the power of perception in the 19th Century. Most famous for his passionate, but informal studies of dancers and nude women, Degas transcends most standard conventions of an objectifying ‘male gaze’ with the key feature of a fixed, almost obsessive stare upon women who seem unaware they are being looked at. With the dancers of Paris, Degas chooses to capture their candid backstage moments in rehearsal studios and dressing rooms, bestowing upon his viewers a peek into restricted parts of the opera house; even his studies of the stage locate him and us up in rafters or in the wings.
“Dancer in her Dressing Room”, Edgar Degas, c.1880, pastel drawing.
A c.1880 pastel drawing ‘Dancer in Her Dressing Room’ positions the spectator behind an ajar door as a young female dancer fluffs out her dress before a performance. In the foreground, Degas draws the sloping, shadowy door frame and protruding corner of the table, both objects of the composition serving as blockages for our full entry into the room. But crucially, they don’t completely obstruct our viewing. Instead, they point to and further direct our gaze to a principal figure in the background, the dancer. Even the busy linework of the wallpaper and flooring seem to move our eyes towards her. Yet we remain hidden, peeping, and the gaze begins to feel voyeuristic and scopophilic. By nature, Impressionists favoured highlighting the essence of the subject rather than immense detail, and the almost blurred texture of Degas’ Impressionist brushwork overcasts the dancer’s face in shadow so that only vague features are pronounced. It could be argued that the obscurity of his models’ faces, not only in how they scarcely return our eyes but also within the brushwork techniques, further amounts to Degas’ objectifying gaze upon women, not registering their ability to look back on us at all.
Degas would further study women working in brothels; often in the acts of bathing or undressing, and once again never returning our gaze. Much like the dancer in her dressing room, our viewership of these women in the brothels feels less like ‘backstage access’ for the public and more like an invasion of privacy. Although these women were sex workers, moments of intimate private bathing did not constitute labour that the customer would’ve been a part of. So, once again Degas positions us beyond the boundaries of a professional relationship into somewhere where we are not supposed to be.
“After the Bath, Woman Drying Herself”, Edgar Degas, 1892, pastel drawing.
He constructs us behind doors and furniture, in cornered perspectives watching over the women; always with their backs turned or heads looking away, such as in the 1982 charcoal and pastel drawing ‘After the Bath, Woman Drying Herself’. Aside from the obvious objectification, there is power in the artist’s exploitation of the subject’s vulnerable state, and the secret spectators inevitably participate. Degas’ voyeuristic gaze within his use of composition and modelling is so obvious that it is starting to feel deliberate, possibly even subversive.
Within the highly charged power dynamics present in his artwork, we can question the context of Degas’ own social life and find it remarkably bare and lonely. By the end of his career, he had isolated himself from bohemian artist friends and colleagues due to his conservative politics, and his dual misanthropic and misogynistic attitude to the rest of society was upheld by his apparent celibacy – somewhat ironic in terms of his risqué subject matter.
“Woman with Field Glasses”, Edgar Degas, 1868, oil thinned with turpentine on faded pink paper.
Perhaps calling Degas an early incel is taking my art historian’s audacity too far. But an 1868 thinned oil painting sketch, ‘Woman with Field Glasses’, could provide some answers to the morally enigmatic figure of Edgar Degas. The model was a woman who posed for some of Degas’ paintings at the horse races, but this time, we are the object of her gaze, and she dominates our entire viewership. She returns the spectator’s gaze full-on, and her eyes are replaced with the dark, glossy lens of the binoculars; cooly piercing both Degas and the viewer. They cast a shadow over her face and her lips are pursed in an unforgiving glare.
“Woman with Field Glasses”, Edgar Degas, 1877, oil on cardboard.
Degas would go on to study this figure several more times over the years of his career, including in an 1877 painting of the same name. She is a striking confrontation and examination of Degas’ own voyeurism and gaze, as well as the spectator’s. The power dynamic Degas has cultivated, with both us and himself, that thrived on breaking the boundaries of autonomy and privacy, is now entirely disrupted. It is instead the boundaries of artist, spectator, subject, agent, that are disordered, and the hierarchy of power now seems less clear. Has the door we were hiding behind creaked too loudly, have we fallen from the shadowy rafters? Or has Degas felt compelled to confront the authority of looking, that both artist and spectator feel so entitled to? Perhaps his voyeurism has always been confrontational? Gendered power dynamics are in themselves essential to Degas’ subjects, as sex work was just as much a part of the dancers’ realities as of the women in the brothel. It could be argued that Degas played upon an audacity of objectification already present in the society of his spectators, and here we are confronted more openly; for once, the subject leers over our own vulnerability, in the curious act of looking.
