The National Gallery’s imaginatively choreographed Degas & Miss La La is a triple delight: it tells the story of two artists, one painting and the moment when popular spectacle became the raw material for modern art.
Set in a circular gallery like a big top tent, walls lined with Belle Époque posters advertising the pleasure palaces of the Folies Bergère and the Hippodrome, it is a suitably festive (and free) exhibition to begin the Gallery’s bicentennial year and a welcome exploration of an unusual, often overlooked picture.
Painted in 1879, Degas’ “Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando” depicts acrobat-aerialist Anna Albertine Olga Brown — known offstage as Olga — performing her signature iron-jaw act of rising 20 metres to the circus’s roof supported only by a rope clenched between her teeth. Hung high in the centre of the gallery, the painting demands that we stare up as the audience would have done: to a vertiginous, brilliant rendering of a vertiginous, brilliant performance.
The thin rope dangles tremulously down the entire length of the picture. Degas freezes an instant when Miss La La is suspended in the air and conveys her grace, strength, flexibility, but there is a frisson of danger. Her double act partner Theophilia Szterker, whom Degas also sketched, later plunged to her death rehearsing a similar stunt. Miss La La was fearless: another feat was hanging upside down from a trapeze while holding in her jaw a 300kg cannon barrel as it was fired.
The Cirque Fernando opened in 1875 in Montmartre; on the doorstep were Degas’ and Renoir’s ateliers. Each attended with their sketchbook when Miss La La’s Troupe Kaira visited from Germany in winter 1878, then invited performers to pose in their studios.
Renoir depicted pale teenage sisters Francisca and Angelina Wartenberg receiving oranges thrown in tribute on to the stage in “Acrobats at the Cirque Fernando”, borrowed here from Chicago. Degas’s interest was 20-year-old mixed-race Olga, born in the port city of Stettin, Prussia (now Szczecin, Poland) to a white mother and African-American father, a sailor turned timber worker. In Paris, her racial identity was celebrated — she was called the Black Butterfly or Black Venus. What was unmentionable, in the years following the Franco-Prussian war, was her nationality: a gymnast prodigy, she was a product of militaristic Prussia’s obsession with physical education from the earliest age.
The two paintings, both exhibited in 1879, are a fabulous pairing. Renoir paints his acrobats as little girls: delicate, smooth, pink-white flesh, glittery costumes, an aura of childhood sweetness as they simper to the audience. He began his career as a porcelain painter of sparkling rococo fantasies, updated here to a 19th-century setting. By contrast, Degas shoots straight forward to cosmopolitan modernity with the dynamic figure of a muscular Black performer within a cropped geometric frame, a rhythmic arc of rectangular windows, stacked arches, iron tresses.
The show pulls together the many drawings where he worked out this design and Olga’s pose: legs twisting as she ascends in rotating movement, arms outstretched, torso taut, a model of compressed energy. Intriguingly, a pastel from the Getty emphasises her skin, offset by a bright blue and yellow outfit, more than in the final painting, where tan skin tones harmonise with a subdued orange background.
The pastel was followed by a full-size oil sketch including an impressionistic rendering of the crowd in the ring and a deep red curtain. And then Degas jettisoned all that for his stark, simplified construction: a slice of ceiling in close-up and a single, dramatically foreshortened figure. Why?
Degas, famously, loved to paint working women: dancers, singers, washerwomen, milliners, sex workers; bodies dressed, adorned, stripped, marketed, deformed by life’s hardships, transformed into illusions, plus associated implications of sexual commerce such as ogling male spectators. He accorded his female subjects empathy and respect, probably seeing them as his alter ego: the industrious artist pushing to the limit to create a shimmer of artifice on canvas.
“Miss La La” belongs to this group but the bold composition distinguishes her. Reaching for the rafters, she is dazzlingly out of reach, weightless, free, her head turned away from us and the audience, which has disappeared. Degas monumentalises her, drawing out her relationship with the architecture. Her vertical pose follows the column against which she rises, her slightly arched body and head thrown back echo the curving arches, one arm is parallel to a girder and gold trimming links her costume to the gilded decor.
The linearity and grid of curves anticipate Cubism’s spatial complexities, while the circus motif gave art a fresh theme and metaphor for the painter as bohemian outsider-enchanter. Walter Sickert’s “The Trapeze” (1920) set beneath a big top dome, homage to Degas, is included in the show. There could have been others: Seurat’s “Circus”, Picasso’s saltimbanques, Toulouse-Lautrec’s Cirque Fernando equestrians, one of which appeared in the version of this exhibition at New York’s Morgan Library in 2013.
A difference between the two shows is increased interest in Olga here, mirroring the last decade’s expansion in Black social history. Photographs at the Morgan already showed her dignity, beauty, self-possession offstage; now her biography is amplified with previously unseen images which, the National Gallery says, “complete Olga’s transcendence beyond racial stereotypes; they situate her within traditional narratives of middle-class respectability, marriage and motherhood”.
It is a heartening biography. After Szterker’s death in 1888, Olga married Emanuel Woodson, an African-American contortionist from Missouri, and had a daughter whom she chaperoned — like the mothers in Degas’ paintings — to dance classes. The family settled in Brussels where her husband was stage manager of the Palais d’Eté; she became a grandmother and lived, always with her daughter, until 1945.
From a chic twenty-something in formal travelling suit and matching hat in France to the steady-eyed, buoyant woman in her eighties in wartime Belgium, in every image she is elegantly dressed, poised, gazing out warmly. Her expression gives away nothing of what she felt as a Black woman in a predominantly white society, nor — despite curatorial insistence on his Creole ancestry and family links to slavery — did Degas ever indicate what, if anything, he thought about depicting a Black figure.
My sense is that it was peripheral to his intentions for the painting. And happily, despite the show’s ideological framing — to reclaim “Black models . . . from the shadows into which they have been relegated for too long” — neither Degas nor Olga are pinned down by cultural theory. They soar towards modernity and individual self-expression, and their high spirits take us with them.
To September 1, nationalgallery.org.uk
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