Melancholy with Chrysanthemums: Degas

Résumé 0

Among those of Degas’s works which represent women, some seem to belong to the iconographic tradition of melancholy: these works interfere with the stereotype of the “misogynistic” painter looking at women with “patient hatred” (as Huysmans said) and testify to sympathy for them. No doubt this ambivalence has to be understood as pertaining to his Saturnian personality and to the logic of identification and projection. This paper takes this point of view to focus on the theme of dancers, which might reflect this melancholic artist’s aspiration to be free of weight, to be able to balance. Furthermore, the recalled image of the dancers and the sensuality of colour in the artist’s later works can be associated with the fin de siècle motif of the “nymphs”, the beloved object’s surviving image that, because of its erotic force, maintains the will to live.