The Aesthetics of Presence: Looking at Degas's Bathers

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to analyze ways in which Edgar Degas's depictions of female bathers produced from the late 1870s to the 1890s suggest the presence or absence of a spectator in a manner that affects the interpretation of the works’ pictorial content. Since their initial public exhibition, Degas's depictions of women performing a range of personal ablutions have provoked questions concerning the act of looking owing to the way in which they generate a sense of intrusion on an individual's private acts. Typically, the works are described as representations of women in “female spaces” that solicit the inquisitive gaze of a male spectator.1 One of the principal repercussions of this view is that in order to comprehend the full implications of the works’ content, viewers of the works need to occupy the perspective of an implied male onlooker. This article argues that the imposition of a male gaze on Degas's bather scenes overlooks the varied nature of spectatorship demanded by the works and, in certain cases, misconstrues the works’ fictional content. I shall identify and contrast two subsets of representation in Degas's bather works, one that includes a role for the viewer in connection with the visual fiction and one that does not. I shall argue that the differences between the two sets of works entail different conceptions of the act of looking that are crucial to an interpretation of the works’ pictorial content. Finally, in connection with the works that do engage the viewer's personal viewpoint, I shall outline the basis of a performance model of spectatorship in which the viewer is invited to play a role in connection with the visual fiction represented in the work. For the purposes of the following discussion, I shall use the term ‘viewer’ to refer to a person who looks at a work of art and the term ‘spectator’ to identify the look of an individual represented either explicitly or implicitly within the content of the visual fiction.2

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