Picasso Looks at Degas

Between 1900 and 1904, Picasso sketched and painted numerous images set in the cafés and cabarets that he and his bohemian friends frequented both in Barcelona and in Paris. His images focused not only on the performers but also on the clientele, figures for which Picasso often asked his friends to pose. Among the largest of these is the Portrait of Sebastià Junyer i Vidal (Fig. 5), painted in Barcelona in 1903. While this work may record a scene the artist observed, it is also clearly a response to Degas’ earlier In a Café (L’Absinthe) (Fig. 6). Not only do both works feature a male friend of the artist — in Degas’s case it is Marcellin Desboutin, an artist and writer just as Junyer was — but both are accompanied by women of implicitly questionable morals. Degas’ sitter, the actress Ellen Andrée, poses in front of a glass of absinthe with a slumped posture and unfocused gaze, while the unidentified sitter in Picasso’s canvas wears a low-cut dress and a red flower in her hair that may mark her as a prostitute. Moreover, Degas’ painting was widely known in Paris by the time Picasso began visiting; it was called one of his most well-known paintings by one critic and was reproduced in a major article on his work in 1894. In his canvas Picasso seems deliberately to have reworked a subject identified with Degas and made it his own.

The Little Dancer Aged Fourteen (Fig. 7) was the largest sculpture Degas ever made. When he exhibited the original wax version in 1881, complete with a gauze tutu and real hair tied with a silk ribbon, it provoked both high praise and harsh criticism. It remained in Degas’ studio for the rest of his life (an edition of bronzes was cast posthumously) where numerous visitors, including some who also knew Picasso, surely saw it. Thanks to these observers, as well as to the circulation of several preparatory drawings and their publication in art journals, the renown of the work was widespread even when it was not on public view. When Picasso was at work on the many sketches and preparatory works for his Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907; Museum of Modern Art, New York), he seems to have drawn inspiration from Degas’ famous sculpture. Standing Nude (Fig. 8) belongs to a group of works related to the Demoiselles, although the figure did not reappear in the final painting. The canvas, however, is almost exactly the same height as the Little Dancer, and the figure’s pose, with her hands behind her back and her right leg forward, is equally close to that of the sculpture. Moreover, the radical nature of Degas’ realism also finds an echo in Picasso’s striking formal experimentation, and the “depravity” that more than one critic saw in the older work parallels the implied morality of Picasso’s figures in the Demoiselles, who were prostitutes in a brothel.

In 1917, having agreed to work with Serge Diaghilev on a project for the Ballets Russes, Picasso met Olga Khokhlova, a dancer trained in Saint Petersburg who had joined the Ballets Russes six years earlier. For roughly the next decade, dance subjects became a major theme for the artist. Initially Olga appeared in many of these images, but her professional career ended after the birth of the couple’s son in 1921, so in the spring of 1925, when the family joined Diaghilev in Monte Carlo, Picasso concentrated on other members of the troupe, mostly off stage. Inevitably, he had to contend with the precedent set by Degas, whose extensive dance pictures had come more fully to light at the collection sales after his death in 1917. Two Seated Dancers (Fig. 9) combines the linear simplicity of many of Picasso’s drawings of the period with the flattened forms and multiple viewpoints of Cubism, but his dancers, if slightly more elegant, hold the same sorts of postures as the two right foreground figures in Degas’ Dancers in the Classroom (Fig. 10).