A Fresh Page

Fresh. A fresh page. "Turn over a new leaf" as they say. I did. Literally. I started a short piece in the notebook; starting with a kaleidoscope of images and topics, all colliding into each other, then settling down into a pattern, finally forming a topic. Degas og Orleans. To the non-Danish that "og" would be pronounced like the "og" in Caveman argot, in the speak of Anthony Burgess in 2001 in front of the black obelisk, "Og!" Maybe even in the suave but chilling curse of Alex in A Clockwork Orange. But relax, "og" just means and in Danish. It is the title of a catalogue-book that I picked up for a snip at 10 Danish kroner. There was in the 1990's an exhibition in which the New Orleans Museum of Art cooperated with Ordrupgaard Gallery to put on a show of Degas's art connected with New Orleans. What attracted to me the book was the cover pastel. The book was lying on top of an out of date atlas and other books of irrelevancies. Of course there might be a sad soul who collects those - I don't. The cover pastel is of a woman (Matilde Mussen in the catalogue) but later I discovered that it is her sister Estelle Mussen who married René de Gas, the artist's brother. The pastel is in the Ordrupgaard Gallery. She was pregnant at the time, and perhaps this accounts for the colours in the face, and the expansive dress. Her skin tones and the grey-blue eyes are echoed in the dress and the indefinite vista to her left. A light orange tinges her lips which in cooperation with a salmon pink are reflected in the trimming of her top. She holds a fan that is a vague slab. The lighting in the pastel suggests heat one that radiates and irradicates the visual definition of the balcony. There are features that I dwell on when I look at the pastel - like the hair. She has a fringe that points up like a Gothic arch, and the eye brows plus her nose area seem to be in simpatico with the arches in the railing. The mass and airiness of the dress is Dega's forte. I remember seeing something similar in the 1980's work of Francesco Clemente, the Italian neoexpressionist. The sketchiness of the pastel links the work . Of course in Degas we are confronted with impressionism - the art of suggestion. But the modelling in the face is not adventurous. You find that face in the Renaissance. The more abstract forms are found in the accompanying sketches that led to this work. In one of the drawings, we see that Degas is no Raphael - Estelle has a masculine face, the shading and neck, looks as if they are coming towards rather than receding. The arm does not look as if it belongs to the body. A metaphysical paradox which you find in many drawings, where the artist fails to integrate and harmonise the parts. Yet, this is a mistake, because what Degas is doing, is sorting out the planes or levels of the art, working in different media to understand the colours, etc. Funnily enough, those experiments, like the rough models of sculptors of the period, anticipate the works of the Fauvists like Henri Matisse by thirty or more years.