This is the third in a series of posts relating my visit to Paris in October 2019.
Part One Part Two

Nearly seven years ago, the exhibition Degas at the Opera, before going on to the USA’s National Gallery of Art, appeared at the Musée d’Orsay; I made it one of my objectives of my first visit to Paris. The day was not exactly full-on flânerie, but a reasonably indirect promener towards my objective, taking in an interesting if perhaps predictable encounter with a Parisian waiter somewhere in the Opéra Garnier and Grands Boulevards to negotiate sustenance (I have always been a fan of French Onion Soup, and had got it into my head it would provide the stamina I needed), as well as the art of the public sphere as related in the first and second parts of this dossier de Paris.

I must have crossed the Seine, for the Musée d’Orsay is on its left bank. It occupies the site of the Palace d’Orsay, which was slowly built during the first half of 19th century on the initiative of Napoleon Bonaparte and assigned to his Council of State, and burned to the ground by the Communards in 1871, a event described by Émile Zola as “rolling like torrents of hell”¹.

The palace was replaced by a new duo of a hotel alongside the first electrified urban railway station in the world, built in time for the 1900 Paris Exposition (which brought international attention to Art Nouveau), the Gare d’Orsay. The building, designed in the somewhat dated Beaux-Arts style, which even in its heyday anachronistically produced neoclassical, Renaissance and Baroque influences in modern materials, seems to capture a liminal and transitional moment in the architecture of the city. Designed to complement its elegant and culturally sensitive environs, the station nevertheless reshaped 19th century aesthetics for the modern, connected city.

As the 20th century began to grow into maturity, the station declined, but the site retained its symbolic power. De Gaulle used the hotel ballroom to announce his return to French national politics, triggering the end of the French Fourth Republic. In the dislocations and estrangements of the 1970s, the new Réseau Express Régional needed only an underground station at the site, and the original station was to be demolished. Instead the Ministry of Culture made it a protected monument, and as it transpired a place for a new museum to act as a time-bridge between the art housed in the Louvre and the new modern art showcase the Pompidou Centre.

Soon Degas transitioned towards his trademark of deploying the traditions of the historical painter on contemporary subjects, this exhibition commemorating 350 years of the Paris Opéra, which it claims as the centre of Degas’ research as a more mature artist.

It seemed well attended:

“Serious in a frivolous place”, the subscribers.

Ludovic Halévy, a playwright, novelist and co-librettist with Henri Meilhac of Offenbach and his own cousin Bizet, introduced Degas to the Opera in the early 1870s. In return, Degas portrayed him “on stage” in a pastel shown at the fourth “Impressionist Exhibition” (1879). Facing Albert Boulanger-Cavé, a longtime censor of public performance arts, Halévy is in his natural element, compact and dark against a light background, being “serious in a frivolous place”.

The Opera as technical laboratory

The Opera was a veritable catalyst and laboratory for Degas’s art as he renewed his approach to media, formats (fans, “tableaux en long”), viewpoints (from above, from below or di sotto in sù ̧ off-centred, askew), and lighting effects.
This was the only world he explored using the gamut of media practised over a lifetime: print (engraving and lithography), photography, pastel, painting (on paper or canvas), sculpture, fans… It was with the Opera that he began to work with monotype and its black-and-white contrasts suitable for expressing the violence of electric lighting, and produced the only sculpture ever exhibited during his lifetime, in wax and composites.

1. In his 1892 novel La Débâcle. An English edition of the time is available at archive.org ↩︎