Fans at the Fourth Impressionist Exhibition of 1879: In the spring of 1879, Degas was excitedly preparing a gallery of painted fans for the fourth Impressionist exhibition. He wrote a note to his friends and co-exhibitors Félix and Marie Bracquemond, asking them to contribute to this endeavor, noting that Camille Pissarro, Jean-Louis Forain, and Berthe Morisot would be participating. His plan was to make an impact with an entire room of the exhibition devoted to fan paintings by several artists. In fact, though, Morisot bowed out entirely that year following childbirth (exhibiting her own painted fans the next year), and Degas was unsuccessful in convincing the Bracquemonds to contribute fans. (They both did exhibit other works that year.) The Met’s
Fan Mount: The Ballet is believed to have been among the five fans Degas presented at the exhibition, alongside
Fan Mount: Dancers (The Met
29.100.555). In the end, not enough of his friends contributed fans to devote a whole gallery to them. Degas, Pissarro, and Forain alone showed painted fans, and they were displayed throughout the exhibition with each of their own works. (Pissarro’s twelve fans appeared in a different room than Degas’s five and Forain’s four fans. Mary Cassatt’s pastels and paintings included images of women holding fans.)
Of the at least twenty-seven fans produced by Degas, twenty of them were created between 1878 and 1880, and all but one of these twenty were decorated with ballet scenes. Degas was not alone in this strong interest in fans at this creative moment in Paris: the painter and printmaker Henri Guérard (husband to Eva Gonzalès), for one, showed an entire collection of his painted fans at the gallery La Vie Moderne in 1879 as well. At the annual Salons, the vogue for fan painting was strong, too, and often the product of female artists.
The Fan Mount: This fan mount is unique in Degas’s production, as it is the only one to include carefully constructed black lines that mimic the segments of a real, functional folding fan before it has been mounted onto wooden ribs, or sticks made of more precious materials, such as ivory, mother of pearl, or tortoise shell. In a letter to Met conservator Dorothy Mahon, former National Gallery of Art conservator Ann Hoenigswald (1986) noted that the x-ray of this work indicated that Degas may have had “some sort of framework under the black silk, forced the fabric over it and allowed pigment particles to fall on either side of the raised area. He then removed the armature and was left with its image as a negative, black line.” Still, it is not believed that Degas ever intended to mount this painting on silk. The black lines, alternately thicker and thinner, create the illusion of receding and projecting folds of fabric and may well have been a one-time experiment on the artist’s part to better imitate the genre’s function. Interestingly, as Marc Gerstein (1978) noted, the work is listed in Durand-Ruel’s account book at the time of its purchase as “Eventail Monté nacre” (Fan Mounted mother of pearl). The only possibility of the work having been mounted in this manner would be if it had temporarily become the property of another, unidentified owner who mounted it before the work returned to Brame by 1891; Pantazzi (1988) presented this possibility, though it seems far-fetched today. According to The Met’s conservators, there is no evidence that the work was ever mounted.
The ballet scene depicted from a bird’s-eye view draws from two previous compositions by Degas. The pose of the dancer at upper left is the same as that of the dominant figure in
Ballet (often called
The Star, ca. 1876–77, Musée d’Orsay, Paris; see also the version dated about 1876–78 in the Philadelphia Museum of Art), a colorful, pastel over monotype work in which the main flower-bedecked figure strides forward from the wings on one leg with arms spread. Echoing her pose and to her right in The Met’s fan is a dancer in the very same somewhat tentative arabesque as the central figure of Degas’s
The Dance Class (1874, The Met
1987.47.1), as well as a waiting dancer at far right with arms akimbo and right foot forward, whose pose follows that of a dancer standing on the risers at rear right in
The Dance Class. (The same dancer appears on the risers in the Musée d’Orsay’s version of
The Dance Class [begun 1873, completed 1875–76].) Below these figures, cropped at chest height and represented to appear closer to the viewer, are women’s figures barely outlined in gold-toned metallic paint, which previous scholars have left unnoticed. Degas presents these audience members in fanciful hats and evening gowns seen from behind the rear entry to their loge. Of the known fans Degas created,
Fan Mount: The Ballet appears to be the only one to include both audience members and performers. The artist has created an imaginary, combined space where dancers and loge figures commingle and appear in overlapping points of view. The artist pursued this kind of disorienting spatial composition in the slightly later pastel
Ballet from an Opera Box (ca. 1884, Philadelphia Museum of Art), which also jarringly conjoins the loge and stage spaces. In The Met’s daring composition with vast empty spaces and muted tones, references to Degas’s earlier works populate the center. The artist has caught or invented a moment in a ballet performance at the Paris Opéra, where he spent many hours, days, and evenings studying the dancers, classes, rehearsals, and performances. (For more information about the Paris Opera Ballet and Degas’s time spent there, see the section of the same title in the online Catalogue Entry for Degas’s
The Dance Class [The Met
1987.47.1].)
The entire scene is painted predominantly in white watercolor on a black silk fabric that serves as the background. Details of the stage flats and pools of light on the stage added in silver-toned paint punctuate the otherwise muted composition, which is also unique among the artist’s fans for its lack of coloration. At left, the stage is sprinkled with silvery powder, and the thin washes of simulated silver paint (also found in the large stage flat at right and elsewhere) actually are composed of tin, not apt to tarnish. Similarly, the gold-toned paint used to delineate the figures and details of their costumes is made of brass powder used by commercial decorators and amateur artists (see Pantazzi 1988 and Hoenigswald and Jones 2014).
Degas’s Fans and Japonisme: Most likely, the fan-painting craze in Paris began with the increase in the availability of Japanese fans in Europe from the early 1860s on.[1] Even closer in time, though, in 1878, Paris was the site of an International Exposition for which Japan’s artwork was on view and well-received. There, Degas has been said to have seen Japanese fans.[2] With the arrival of the exhibition, Ernest Chesneau wrote “Le Japon à Paris” (Japan in Paris), an article in the influential
Gazette des Beaux-Arts that introduced Japanese paintings and crafts to cultured Parisians. Degas’s friend and fellow denizen of the Café de la Nouvelles-Athènes Philippe Burty collected Japanese fans, among other
Japoniste articles, which Degas may well have seen. By the time of his death, we know that Degas’s own collection of Asian art included some one hundred and one ukiyo-e prints, sixteen books on Japanese art, one Chinese painting, and one Japanese painting (sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, November 1918). Some of the many fans being produced in Paris at this moment, like Degas’s, were not even intended to be folded and mounted on sticks, but simply mounted and framed, as with The Met’s two examples.
In the current composition, the artist employed a bird’s-eye view, which is a compositional device directly influenced by Japanese and Chinese paintings. The use of open space or, as at right in
Fan Mount: The Ballet, washes of silver paint to evoke theatre flats, both recall the flat ground of Japanese and Chinese ink painting (Nakatani 1988). Indeed, Nakatani noted that Degas’s fan pictures “seem to incorporate more artistic elements from Japanese screens, hanging scroll paintings, and crafts than ukiyo-e prints.” As an example, he cites this fan at The Met, whose dark-figure dancers silhouetted in light are only distinguishable through their outlines in gold paint and whose surrounding stage sets are painted in silver-toned metallic paint “so the overall impression of the picture recalls screen paintings or lacquer boxes with gold paint on black lacquer in the Korin style” (Nakatani 1988). Akiko Mabuchi and Caroline Mathieu have asserted that Degas definitely knew the work of Agata Korin and the Korin school.[3] The Met’s fan has been compared to the
hinoki (Japanese cypress) pattern fan by Kosa (early 17th century, Itsuo Museum, Osaka), the
Cattle Driving scene on one of several scattered fans depicted on a screen by Tawaraya Sotatsu (early 17th-century, Daigoji temple, Kyoto), and the
Tale of Ise fan pictures in color on gold ground attached to a pair of screens (early 17th-century) (Nakatani 1988). Of this specific moment of engagement with Japanese art in Degas’s work, Nakatani concludes, “It can be stated unequivocally that there is no other part of Degas’s oeuvre, either before or after these fan pictures, in which he made such an obvious use of elements of Japanese art, including materials and techniques, in his work” (Nakatani 1988). One of the critics at the 1879 exhibition made note of the connection to Japanese sources: Paul Sébillot wrote in
La Plume, comparing some of Degas’s fans to “une fantaisie japonisée très curieuse” (a very curious Japanese fantasy).[4]
Degas’s Probable Motivations for Fan Painting: Degas embraced the formal challenges presented by the semicircular surface of the fan and found in it a new locus for experimentation, both compositionally and technically. Whether devoting himself to an image
en camaieu (a technique using only two or three tints of the same color to create a monochromatic image without regard to local or realistic color) or departing from that basic device to include paint made of tin to evoke silver powder and wash (see Pantazzi 1988), using new materials such as silk, or even, also as here, employing a bird’s-eye view and vast swathes of open space, innovation was always top of mind. As the scholar Ronald Pickvance noted, “For Degas in particular, these fan paintings of the late 1870s became outlets for innovative bravura and unrestrained expression as much as his conscious exploitation of print-making techniques or his novel ideas on sculpture.”[5]
The artist also, as in this case, sold some of them as sure sources of income (see Gerstein 1982, pp. 108–9), writing to a friend that the dealer Hector Brame ordered two fans from him for two hundred francs, one of which is believed to be this fan (whose first owner was Brame) (Degas [1879–80]). Marc Gerstein (1978) noted that Brame must have acquired the fan from Degas in February or March 1879 since his name was added to Degas’s list of his works intended for the 1879 Impressionist exhibition only after the list had been finished, and the exhibition was not organized until about March of that year. After 1880, Gerstein (1982) contends, Degas abandoned the format due to both the low prices he received and the modest profit gained for his fans from his dealer Paul Durand-Ruel. Others have noted Degas’s improved financial position after 1880 that led him away from more commercial ventures. Most recently, Kimberly Jones (2019, pp. 248, 250) stressed the importance of seeing such works as beyond mere “articles” the artist painted for gain, but rather as a part of a radical formal experiment from which he simply moved on. Surely, The Met’s
Fan Mount: The Ballet is one such example of an artist pushing himself to surprisingly new and different avenues of expression.
Jane R. Becker 2023
[1] See Gerstein 1982, p. 106 and Ronald Pickvance in
Edgar Degas, Mie Prefectural Art Museum and Tokyo Shinbun, eds., exh. cat., Isetan Museum of Art, Tokyo, 1988, p. 82, under no. 19.
[2] Siegfried Wichmann,
Japonisme: The Japanese Influence on Western Art in the 19th and 20th Centuries, New York, 1985, p. 164.
[3] Akiko Mabuchi and Caroline Mathieu in
Le Japonisme, exh. cat., Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, 1988, p. 186, under no. 203.
[4] Paul Sébillot, “Revue artistique,”
La Plume, May 15, 1879, p. 73; see Berson 1996.
[5] Pickvance 1988, as in n. 1, p. 82, under no. 19.
