The Shape of a Pocket

exhibiting anything.) The statuettes were not made as sketches or preparatory studies for some other work. They were made for their own sake, yet they had served their purpose: they had reached their point of apogee and so could be abandoned.
    The apogee point for him was when the drawn entered the drawing, when the sculpted passed into the sculpture. This was the only rendezvous and transfer that interested him.
    I can’t explain how the drawn enters a drawing. I only know that it does. One gets closest to understanding this when actually drawing. On Degas’ tombstone in the cemetery of Montmartre the only words written are: ‘
Il aimait beaucoup le dessin
.’ (‘He liked drawing very much.’)
    Let us now think of the charcoal drawings, pastels, monotypes and bronzes of women. Sometimes they are presented as ballet dancers, sometimes as women at their toilette, sometimes (particularly in the monotypes) as prostitutes. Their presentation is unimportant: the ballet, the bathtub or the bordel were, for Degas, only pretexts. This is why any critical discussion about a pictorial ‘scenario’ usually misses the point. Why was Degas so fascinated by women washing themselves? Was he a keyhole voyeur? Did he consider all women tarts? (There is an excellent essay by Wendy Lesser in her book
His Other Half in
which she dismantles such questions.)
    The truth is that Degas simply invented or used any occasion to pursue his study of the human body. It was usually women’s bodies because he was heterosexual and so women amazed him more than men, and amazement is what prompted his kind of drawing.
    Straightaway there were people who complained that the bodies he depicted were deformed, ugly, bestial, contorted. They even went so far as to assert that he hated those he drew!
    This misunderstanding arose because he disregarded the conventions of physical beauty as conventionally transmitted by art or literature. And, for many viewers, the more a body is naked, the more it should be clothed in convention, the more it should fit a norm, either a perverse or an idealised one; the naked have to wear the uniform of a regiment! Whereas Degas, starting from his amazement, wanted each profile of the particular body he was remembering, or watching, to surprise, to be improbable, for only then would its uniqueness become palpable.
    Degas’ most beautiful works are indeed shocking, for they begin and end with the commonplace – with what Wendy Lesser calls ‘the dailiness’ of life – and always they find there something unpredictable and stark. And in this starkness is a memory of pain or of need.
    There is a statuette of a masseuse massaging the leg of a reclining woman which I read, in part, as a confession. A confession, not of his failing eyesight, nor of any suppressed need to paw women, but of his fantasy, as an artist, of alleviating by touching – even if the touch was that of a stick of charcoal on tracing paper. Alleviating what? The fatigue to which all flesh is heir …
    Many times he stuck additional strips of paper on to his drawings because, master that he was, he lost control of them. The image led him further than he calculated going, led him to the brink, where he momentarily gave way to the other. All his late works of women appear unfinished, abandoned. And, as with the bronze horses, we can see why: at a certain instant the artist disappeared and the model entered. Then he desired no more, and he stopped.
    When the model ‘entered’, the hidden became as present on the paper as the visible. A woman, seen from the back, dries her foot which is posed on the edge of a bath. Meanwhile the invisible front of her body is also there, known, recognised, by the drawing.
    A feature of Degas’ late works is how the outlines of bodies and limbs are repeatedly and heavily worked. And the reason is simple: on the edge (at the brink), everything on the other, invisible, side is crying out to be recognised and the line searches … until the invisible comes in.
    Watching the woman standing on one leg and drying her foot, we are happy for what has been recognised and
admitted.
We feel the existent recalling its own Creation, before there was any fatigue, before the first brothel or the first spa, before the solitude of narcissism, at the moment when the constellations were given names. Yes, this is what we sense watching her keeping her balance.
    So what did he leave behind, if it wasn’t finished masterpieces?
    Do we