A private and repressed man, Degas has posthumously been labelled a misogynist, yet he had a unique genius for capturing the female form in motion. On the eve of a major new exhibition, Mark Hudson looks at the most enigmatic of the Impressionists
Beyond the opulent facade of the Paris Opera, and the marbled entrance halls and salons, there is a warren of bleak corridors connecting the offices, rehearsal rooms and costume-makers' workshops.
In the centre of this area, right behind the stage itself, lies a gilded chamber quite as splendid as anything in the theatre's public areas: the so-called Foyer de la Danse. It was here, in the 19th century, that the abonnes, rich and powerful men whose status as "subscribers" gave them access to every area of the theatre, would come after performances to meet the dancers and proposition them.
The status of the dancer was ambiguous: drawn uniformly from poor backgrounds, they acquired a glamour that made them desirable mistresses for the wealthiest members of society. To obtain a rich protector, who might set her up for life, even marry her, was every dancer's goal.
Among the slender dancers and the burly, dinner-suited grandees moved a figure, notebook in hand, who both did and didn't belong. Born into a wealthy banking family, Edgar Degas was of the same class as the other abonnes. But unlike them he wasn't there to chase young flesh, but to observe.
Just as Degas created images that have become synonymous with the romance of the dance, so he chronicled the inescapable seediness of the 19th-century theatrical world - in his illustrations for the novel La Famille Cardinal.
Now seen as a tender icon of youth, Degas's sculpture The Little Dancer Aged Fourteen created outrage when first exhibited in 1881. Cast not in bronze, as we see her today, but modelled in wax, with real hair and clad in real clothes, the unmediated realism of this image of an underage girl, whose profession made her little more than a prostitute, was considered "astoundingly ugly" by contemporary audiences.
Degas is at once the best and the least known of the Impressionists. His ballet pictures are among the most popular images ever created - to modern eyes they look almost too pretty. But in the human chemistry of Impressionism Degas cuts a paradoxical and elusive figure: a severe ascetic with a caustic wit, opinionated, yet intensely private.
The only one of the group with private means, he was an avant-gardist who remained rigidly conservative in his social attitudes, who has gained a posthumous reputation as a misogynist, anti-Semite and snob; an artist obsessed with the old masters and the classical principles of drawing, who was in some ways hardly an Impressionist at all, yet who felt impelled to experiment out of a kind of congenital impatience with the way the world is.
Just below Montmartre is the area of affluent streets where Degas was born in 1834, and where - apart from a period painting in Italy as a youth and an extended stay with relatives in New Orleans - he spent his entire life.
On his death in 1917, hundreds of thousands of drawings were found in folios cramming his studio, along with scores of sculptures. Almost all were of women, above all of ballet dancers, rapid, but incisive sketches of the female body in movement.
As a young man Degas was advised by the great Neoclassisist painter Ingres, "Draw lines, young man". Degas took him at his word. No one has managed to get more vitality and sensuality into simple lines in pencil, charcoal and paint - lines describing the twisting volumes of the female form in space.
No one looked longer or harder at the female body than Degas. Yet there is no evidence that Degas ever touched a woman. For Degas, looking seems to have been everything.
At first ballet was just one of a number of subjects through which Degas set out to tackle the brash realities of the ever-expanding Paris. But gradually his interest in dancers and their world became obsessive.
Quite how he got access to the backstage areas of the Opera isn't clear but his social contacts were always good, and he seems to have been able to move unnoticed through the rehearsal rooms, corridors and dressing rooms, observing the dancers in their most private moments.
While Degas has been described as an "artist of the dance", he wasn't interested in becoming a quasi-official chronicler of the ballet world, still less in glamorising it. His dancers are figures in an industrial process. And while Degas painted notably sympathetic portraits of women of his own class, these worker women remain anonymous.
Late in life he confessed to the English painter Sickert, "Perhaps I have thought about women too much as animals". And Degas's dancers are all women. While there were plenty of male dancers at the Paris Opera, they never appear in Degas's paintings.
Asked to explain his interest in dance Degas replied that "it is all that remains to us of the combined movements of the Greeks", a slightly pretentious way of linking it to his interest in classical sculpture, while on another occasion he claimed that dancers were just an excuse for "painting pretty fabrics and for rendering movement".
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