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"Miss La La's" teeth: reflections on Degas and "race"
Art Bulletin, The, Dec, 2007 by Marilyn R. Brown
Race-thinking is its own best refutation.--Jacques Barzun, Race: A Study in Modern Superstition (1) Disgust always bears the imprint of desire. These low domains, apparently expelled as "Other." return as the object of nostalgia, longing and fascination. The forest, the fair, the theatre, the slum, the circus, the seaside-resort, the "savage": all these, placed at the outer limit of civil life, become symbolic contents of bourgeois desire.--Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (2)
The unexpectedly inverted perspective and seemingly precarious asymmetry of Edgar Degas's Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando (1879, National Gallery, London, Fig. 1) make it one of the artist's most daringly innovative modern genre paintings. Yet this, his only picture of an identifiable person of color, is also a portrait in which the face is virtually effaced by the body, a portrait in which inner life is eschewed in favor of external description. Suspended in midair by the strength of her astounding teeth, the acrobat wears brownish tights, distinguishable as such by wrinkles at the back of a knee. Lit from below, the tan color of the opaque hosiery is echoed in the figure's shadowed arms and face. Exposing more stocking than Degas's famous dancers, the circus performer's legs can be misrecognized as bare, adding an erotic charge to an image produced at a time when women's legs were typically hidden by floor-length skirts. Surrounded by the roughly complementary greenish blues and reddish oranges of the ceiling, as well as the bright yellows and pale violets of the costume, the more tertiary (less "pure," more mixed) tans of the tights serve both to mask and to allude to the performer's mixed-race identity. Even today, viewers may initially miss the fact that the acrobat is ethnically "black." Closer inspection of her hair and nearly lost profile, however, reveals this to be the case. Although Degas himself may have seen a modernist analogy between the performer's remarkably disciplined equilibrium and his own compositional balancing act, the physiognomy and bodily vocabulary he gave to her suggest another story. Her hidden teeth, which hold the dizzy composition together, could unclench at any moment.
Who was this "Miss La La," famous in her own day as "la mulatresse-canon" (the mulatto cannon-woman)? Why did Degas choose to paint her? The motif of a woman performer with tensely choreographed muscles garishly illuminated by artificial lighting clearly connects with Degas's series on Parisian dancers and cafe-concert singers. But this work belongs to no series. Degas very carefully prepared the project with numerous drawings and sketches and produced an adroitly accomplished painting that was successfully received, yet it bore no real progeny, no related series of paintings of other acrobats or circus performers. This probably had something to do with technical problems the painter encountered in completing his vertiginous perspective. However, it is more revealing to examine the picture's idiosyncrasy within Degas's oeuvre in light of the component of its construction most often overlooked by historians: namely, the model's racial identity.
The most common interpretation of Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando links it with a broad iconographic current in modernist art and literature, including Edmond de Goncourt's novel Les freres Zemganno, published the same year as Degas's painting, in which the circus performer serves as a self-referential image of the artist/author. (3) In Goncourt's novel, for example, the fall of one of the male acrobat protagonists, Nello Zemganno, refers symbolically to the recent death of Goncourt's own brother, Jules. (4) In the case of Miss La La, this kind of cultural reading, with one exception, has not really broached a different kind of projection of identity: in its relation to race. (5) Yet the painting clearly addresses the way a specifically white masculinity has defined identity in relation to what it characterizes as "low, dark and irremediably corporeal." (6) In depicting Miss La La's elevation, Degas reversed the expected relation of "high" and "low," linking his image with the carnivalesque. (7)
An important exception to the prevalent interpretative focus on Miss La La and the circus is a recent article by James Smalls. Discussing the picture as part of a larger, substantial study of the modern spectacle of "race" in late-nineteenth-century French art and popular culture, Smalls maps the commercial display of Miss La La and other black performers for public consumption. He convincingly situates Degas's picture within a broader visual practice of social masquerade, ranging from depictions of minstrelsy to those of interracial performance, in which racial difference was simultaneously represented and obfuscated by the white gaze. He sees Degas as selectively destabilizing the image of Miss La La's body, which public expectations marked racially as hypermuscular and exotic. Our approaches and interpretations finally differ, mine being more archivally based and his being more theoretical, but we share many concerns about the intersection of race and gender in this painting as well as about the role of race in the formulation of high modernism. (8) More than Smalls, I explore how Degas destabilized the representation of Miss La La's mixed-race identity through the process of formulating the image in various sketches. In doing so, I situate the picture historically in relation to contemporary constructions of physiognomy and racial hybridity.
