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The idea that the goal of creative effort lay outside the field of allegory and moral precept was quite new in the 1860s, when Degas was coming to maturity as a painter. The highest art was still history painting, in which France had reigned supreme; but since 1855 practically the whole generation of history painters on whom this elevation depended -- above all, Delacroix and Ingres -- had died, and no one seemed fit to replace them. French critics and artists alike, and conservative ones in particular, felt a tremor of crisis, & as others would a century later as the masters of modernism died off. After them, what could sustain the momentum of culture?
And yet, beyond the ruins of the temple, something else was stirring: a sense of the century as unique in itself, full of what Baudelaire called the "Heroism of Modern Life." Its chief bearers, in painting, were to be Manet and Degas.
Born in 1834 into a rich Franco-Italian banking family with branches in Paris, Naples and New Orleans, Degas was never short of money, and he never doubted his vocation as a painter, in which his family encouraged him. He was a shy, insecure and aloof young man; if one did not know this from the testimony of his friends, one would gather it from his early self-portraits, with their veiled look of mannerist inwardness acquired from Pontormo. It seems he was unusually devoid of narcissism: unlike almost every other 19th century painter one has heard of, he gave up painting his own face at 31. It was the Other that fascinated him, all faces except his own.
In time he would construct a formidable "character" to mask his shyness: Degas the solitary, the feared aphorist, the Great Bear of Paris. He never married -- "I would have been in mortal misery all my life for fear my wife might say, 'That's a pretty little thing,' after I had finished a picture." He had a reputation for misogyny, mainly because he rejected the hypocrisy about formal beauty embedded in the salon nudes of Bouguereau or Cabanel -- ideal wax with little rosy nipples. "Why do you paint women so ugly, Monsieur Degas?" some hostess unwisely asked. "Because, madam, women in general are ugly." This was a blague, a put-on.
To find Degas's true feelings about women, one should consult the pastels and oil paintings of nudes that he made, at the height of his powers, in the 1880s and '90s. Their bodies are radiant, worked almost to a thick crust of pastel matte and blooming with myriad strokes within their tough winding contours. But they are also mechanisms of flesh and bone, all joints, protuberances, hollows, neither "personalities" nor pinups. (One sees why Duchamp, inventor of the mechanical bride, adored and copied Degas.)
Not even Nude Woman Having Her Hair Combed, circa 1886-88, the most refined and classical of these nudes, seems in the least Renoiresque, though nothing could be more appealing than that pink, slightly blockish body against the gold couch and the regulating white planes of peignoir and apron. It was a subject to which Degas brought special, almost fetishistic feeling, and a later version of the same theme, The Coiffure, 1896, shows what a vehicle for innovation it could be: the contours of the woman and her maid are now roughed out with an almost fauve abruptness, and they emerge from a continuous orange- russet field that seems to predict Matisse's Red Studio, 1911.