“Discover Degas & Miss La La” - beautiful National Gallery Exhibition

I went to a wonderful exhibition recently on Degas’s painting of “Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando”. 

The National Gallery is currently celebrating its bicentennial birthday. And this exhibition is a lovely touch. It combines drama and spectacle with art and race. What makes this show so refreshing is that it is free of our present day identity-politics and ideological framing. 

I had already covered this painting some years back on a visit; so it was a pleasure to see it again.

It was based on newly discovered information about the painting and its sitter.

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Part 1 - The “Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando” painting by Edgar Degas

A stunning painting.

Miss La La (the acrobat) is ascended towards the rafters of “Cirque Fernando” via a rope clenched between her teeth. Captivating, and slightly horrifying. 😳

The architecture intensifies the dramatics. Her real name is Anna Albertine Olga Brown. Born in 1858 in Prussia (Poland) to a white mother and African American father. She died in 1945. In her time, she reached international fame.

In 1879, aged 21, Degas had attended one her performances at the Cirque Fernando in Paris. He found her mesmerising & painted her suspended gracefully at her most perilous moment.

Her sketched her many times, and invited her to pose in his studio.

This painting was then dispatched to 4th Impressionist exhibition in Paris in 1879.

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Part 2 - Photographs of Olga

 

Olga Brown, aged 20-21.

Olga with dignity and beauty.

Olga with Manuel Woodson (from America) and Rose Eddie. 

At this point, she ran a cafe and inn for stage artists.

Olga Brown Woodson in Brussels, aged 80-82.

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Part 3 - The Cirque Fernando (Degas & Renoir)

Miss La La was the highlight of the show and she became a sensation.

In 1879, Renoir also painted a scene set at Cirque Fernando, showing other acrobats. He was also a keen circus-goer. 

“Acrobats at the Cirque Fernando” by Renoir

A more static pose by Renoir.

This painting shows 2 acrobat sisters Francisca (on left) and Angelina Wartenberg.

They are wearing costumes identical to Miss La La’s. They have concluded their performance & are gathering oranges tossed over by the audience. 

They are pretty, pale, glittery with an aura child-like sweetness. A total opposite of Degas’s strong and fearless gymnast prodigy.

Beautiful golden daubs over fine brushstrokes.

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Some of Degas’s notes and sketches:

 

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Part 4 - Degas and the “Black World”

Degas painted Olga with her natural hair and dark skin colour.

The exhibition explains that Degas was born of a Creole mother (of European descent) from New Orleans. And it suggested that this may have had an effect. 

For me, it doesn’t seem obvious either way. He visited New Orleans in 1872 and it seems he was impressed by the sight of the sizeable black population. He was also fascinated by the juxtaposition of dark and light, and described Black people walking in the bright sunlight like “silhouettes”.

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Courtyard of a House (a New Orleans sketch)

This scene was from Degas’s family home in New Orleans.

His family employed a black nanny who is on the left and is looking after Degas’s nephews and nieces. He paints her crunched low, cropped, and with a rather large hat on her head covering her.

It is clear this little girl (turning to look at us) was special. I love the addition of the family dog (also gazing at us).

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Lady in Black

In this painting, Degas experiments with the effect of light pouring through the white linen curtain.

He called it the “contre-jour” (i.e. against day) which creates a silhouetting effect. It gives the sitter a dark shape in which her identity disappears. 

For me, I don’t think this was the effect he was striking in his “Miss La La” painting at all.

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Part 5 - The painting’s afterlife

A rather sad note about the painting:

Once complete, Degas sent his painting of Miss La La to the Fourth Impressionist exhibition in Paris. It was one of his most ambitious works ever shown at any of these independent shows he had helped organise. Yet the painting attracted little attention and did not sell. Degas kept it in his studio for almost 25 years, before it was sent to exhibitions outside France, including a major show of Impressionist paintings in London in 1905. Bought by a Canadian billionaire, the picture spent the next twenty years or so in Toronto, before being purchased for the National Gallery in 1925, with the Courtauld Fund.

By then Degas had died and Olga, long retired in Brussels, likely never saw the painting at the National Gallery. Miss La La inspired in British painters of the period several circus-themed artworks: celebrations of agility, movement and colour, imbued with the same atmosphere of excitement as Degas’s painting.

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The Daredevils by Thérèse Lessore (1927-1934)

The exhibition shows us Lessore’s portrayal of 

the World’s Fair in Islington, London. The curved arches of the building & green columns are all nods to Degas’s composition. 

Lessore married Walter Sickert (below) as her second husband in 1926.

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The Trapeze by Walter Sickert (1920)

A friend of Degas’s.

Sickert saw the painting of Miss La La hanging in his Paris apartment in 1885.

According to the gallery:

The Trapeze owes a clear debt to the Impressionist master’s picture, with its daring upwards perspective: a swaying figure on a swing stretches her arms to reach a trapeze, her body aligned with the radiating seams of the circus tent above her.