The National Gallery is pulling out the stops to celebrate its bicentenary – but an old-school circus? With dancing dogs, clowns and elephants? Yet that’s what greets you in its ingenious and thrilling show about French impressionism, Black women and modernity.
You walk in expecting paintings but are confronted by posters for circuses and music hall performances, all booming Victorian graphics and surreal imagery. This includes two butterflies with human faces performing at the Cirque d’Hiver while at the Hippodrome, you could see Ben Hur-style chariot races. We think of late 19th-century Paris as all cancan and chansons, absinthe and mirrored bars. But circus, this show reveals, was just as essential to the city of light.
Most famous of all was the Cirque Fernando where Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas saw the acrobat Miss La La and was inspired to paint a dizzying masterpiece of this young woman in empty space, framed against orange, green and gold heights, no ground below her as she swings from a rope by her teeth. This circus was not in a tent but a permanent domed auditorium that stood close to Montmartre until its demolition in 1974. Brightly painted and ornate, it was in the late 1800s a gaslit world of possibilities, where people could escape social constraints into an ether of the new and free. At least that’s the impression you get looking at Degas’s painting Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando in which the heroic aerialist literally lifts herself out of the everyday world by her teeth.
Degas and women is a theme for a blockbuster, but Degas and Black women? I had never thought about the colour of Miss La La’s skin. That’s partly because Degas often plays games with flesh tones, giving people grey or blue or green faces as they appear in shadows or stage lighting.
Here you see Miss La La’s racial identity pinned down from the start, in the array of circus posters that highlight it. Some of these are crudely racist. Yet they also suggest ambivalence. She is the star, with her name in lights and spectacular illustrations of her celebrated exploits. We see her perform her most extreme stunt, even crazier than the one Degas painted: hanging upside down from a trapeze with a cannon suspended by a chain from her teeth as it is fired.
The cannon stunt features in a poster for the Folies-Bergère that revels in her Blackness. In an English music hall poster, she and her partner Kaira are “The Black and White Butterflies”; Miss La La is a black silhouette against a white background, her co-star white on black.
Photographs introduce us to the real woman behind the cannon act. Anna Albertine Olga Brown was born in a Prussian village near the Baltic sea in 1858. Her mother was from a German rural family, her father an African American wood merchant who probably came to the Baltic region as a sailor. It was perhaps the Prussian school system’s emphasis on gymnastics that nurtured the future Miss La La’s talent: she left home to start her career at nine, amazed audiences in Dresden and Vienna, all building up to Paris, the city Walter Benjamin called “the capital of the 19th century.”
In the winter of 1878 Miss La La was the talk of Paris, her act at the Cirque Fernando seen by everyone who was anyone. Degas joined the crowds night after night. And he set out to record this star in her glory in a sensational painting that would be unveiled with the immediacy of news, its paint barely dry, in the Fourth Impressionist Exhibition scheduled for April 1879.
While the weird old posters and faded photographs are relics of a lost time, Degas’s painting puts you right there, in the audience, looking up transfixed, baffled, by Miss La La’s death-defying feat of strength. The radically unexpected viewpoint, empty space and slightly eerie colours give this painting an immersive immediacy.
It takes patience to make something so instantaneous. In his sketchbooks Degas, from the audience, draws Miss La La quickly and is equally attentive to her setting with its columns, girders and soaring void. Degas doesn’t just give an impression of it – he’s not that sort of impressionist – but carefully draws each detail and assiduously notes colours.
But how to get Miss La La exactly right? Quick sketches on the scene weren’t good enough for Degas. Instead he set up a trapeze in his studio and persuaded her to come and pose. This, surely, should be one of the legendary scenes of the Paris avant garde: the aerialist patiently hanging by her teeth in the studio while the enigmatic impressionist master draws her. The results are captivating.
One drawing, intensely coloured in pastels, with free blue lines defining the space, powerfully captures the focus and concentration in her upturned face as she somehow goes on holding the rope in her teeth.
Surely the final painting, completed in four months, would be a hit. But when the Impressionist Exhibition opened that spring, it failed to grab anyone. Instead it was Renoir’s much soppier painting, Acrobats at the Cirque Fernande, that got the acclaim. You can see it at this exhibition: two pallid young performers posing tamely, one with an armful of oranges.
Degas was decades ahead of his time. The brilliant modern move in his circus masterpiece is to remove the audience and liberate Miss La La as a figure in empty space – in contrast with an oil sketch in which he shows her as a smaller presence in the crowded venue. His final work sets her apart, herself alone, a hero of the new modern world where anything is possible and no one will keep their feet on the ground – for the ground has gone.
• Discover Degas & Miss La La is at the National Gallery, London, from 6 June to 1 September
