What can an image really tell us of a person? Two new shows turn upon that evergreen question. The National Gallery’s latest exhibition is ostensibly about one of Degas’s most famous subjects, Miss La La, Paris circus star, drawn and painted by him many times but to exactly what effect? Nan Goldin’s convulsive memorial to her dead sister, meanwhile questions the very truthfulness of photographs.
Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando, Degas’s breathtaking 1879 masterpiece, looks entirely spontaneous. Here is the celebrated acrobat dangling high above the unseen crowd, satin costume flickering lilac in the limelight, arms outstretched like a dancer. She is suspended from a rope held through the sheer iron-jaw strength of her teeth. This spectacular performance is matched by the daring of Degas’s composition, as if he too was somewhere up there, just below the soles of her silky shoes, hanging mid-air in the moment. You would scarcely think this was the work of many days sketching at the circus and painting in the studio. Degas even hired an architectural draughtsman to elucidate the principles of the Cirque Fernando dome.
