Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando

One of my favourite paintings by Edgar Degas is Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando.  As well as being one of his boldest – it’s probably one of the most audacious compositions ever painted in the nineteenth century – it has the great advantage of being easily seeable, since it’s usually on display in the National Gallery in London.  At the moment it’s the centrepiece of a small but absorbing special exhibition there.  When we visited, the main Gallery was awash with visitors and best avoided, but Miss La La had only a few devoted admirers.

The Cirque Fernando was in Montmartre.  It was close to Degas’s studio in the rue Frochot, and he would often go to see a show.  Though the theatre and ballet (and the racecourse) had long stimulated his imagination, he doesn’t seem to have made the connection between circus art and his own visual art until the end of 1878, when ‘Miss La La and the Kaira Troupe’ began to appear at the Cirque.  Then something sparked.  Almost certainly, it was the striking figure of Anna Albertine Olga Brown, ‘Miss La La’, and her astonishing feats as an aerialist in the ring.

Olga was born in 1858 near the Baltic port city of Stettin, now Szczecin in Poland.  Her mother was German-speaking and her father a black American, who had probably arrived as a merchant seaman (Degas also had a part-Black heritage, from his Louisiana family).  She was already flying a trapeze in public aged ten in Dresden, with her partner Kaira (Theophilia Szterker), and had appeared in several parts of Europe, including Britain, before she arrived in Paris.  She had two particularly spectacular acts.  Both involved her teeth.  Upside down, she would hold a heavy cannon suspended from her jaw – and would still be holding it when a fuse was lit and the cannon fired.  In the other feat, the subject of Degas’s picture, she was lifted by an associate via a pulley high towards the ceiling of the circus building, again with the aid of her teeth alone.

Luckily, nine sketches and eight preparatory drawings or pastels for the painting have survived.  They show how Degas wrestled with the problem of how best to capture his chosen subject, a moment late in Miss La La’s ascent towards the top.  He’d chosen the hardest of compositions – a rotating human suspended in air and viewed from below – and the most challenging of backgrounds, the interior of a multangular building, 21 metres high, complete with corbels, square windows and iron girders converging towards the top.

For the acrobat Degas experimented with various poses, but once he’d hit on his solution he stuck with it up to the final oil painting.  Miss La La’s feet and legs twist to suggest her body’s rotational motion, her arms spread out obliquely, echoing the iron girders, and her head is thrown back, accentuating her jaw and her shock of black hair.  Her short white tunic, fringed with gold, clings close to her body.  The setting of the building caused Degas problems, and he even seems to have employed a professional architectural draughtsman, a perspecteur, to help him create a plausible two-dimensional account of its complex geometry.

Some of the worked-up sketches are fine pictures in their own right, but the completed painting is a stunning work, without parallel in Degas’s output.  It’s a night-time scene (the windows are dark) and lamps from below highlight Miss La La’s costume and ornate boots.  She’s off-centre, occupying the top left quadrant of the picture, and holds herself still, as if defying gravity, held only by a rope, the long line of which, descending from the unseen pulley, divides the canvas obliquely into two equal halves.  Her left hand, open with the thumb fully extended, betrays the effort needed to maintain equilibrium in empty space.  Behind the still, vulnerable figure lies the hard, busy architecture of the building, with its warm orange walls, pale green girders and gold-fringed pillars.  Having wandered around the building, though, the upturned eye always returns to the miraculous figure of Miss La La, frozen for a tiny moment in space and time.

The exhibition catalogue is worth buying.  It uncovers the rich forgotten history of the Cirque Fernando, and of Kaira and Miss La La, and includes reproductions of many contemporary posters and photographs, evidence of the strong impression they all made on the Parisian public in the 1870s and 1880s. There are other works by Degas from the same period, including a mysterious lithograph of circus dogs.  The circus appealed to other artists, including Renoir: in the exhibition there’s an oil painting by him, also from 1879, which couldn’t be more different from Degas’s work: a sugary pair of child performers stand in the ring, one holding a bunch of oranges, both aware of the crowd’s delight in them.

The catalogue’s authors ponder the ethnicity of Miss La La, and Degas’s ambivalent attitudes to Blackness, as well as the power relations between artist and subject.  Degas wasn’t satisfied with what he could capture on paper from his visits to the circus.  He invited Olga to his studio, where he rigged up a miniature version of the rope and pulley system, so that she could replicate her performance pose specially for him.  No doubt Degas paid for this service, and on the surface the model, as often, appears to be in all senses the servant of the painter.

But you wonder whether things were that simple.  Could it be that Degas held an overwhelming, reverential admiration for Olga and her astonishing skills?  Or that he could see that in some respects her achievement was greater than his own?  Not only did he work very hard, to judge by the numerous sketches and preparatory works, to arrive at the finished painting, he seems to have faced a lot of difficulty in the process.  He knew all too well that painting was an art full of doubt, and that perfection was an ideal seldom attained.  Olga, on the other hand, had no choice but to be faultless in her skills every time, if she was to avoid injury or even death (her partner Kaira did die, in 1888, in a rehearsal accident).  She was an acclaimed artist in her own right, and at the height of her powers.  She also seems to have been a confident and successful woman.  In 1888 she married ‘Manuel’ Woodson, an American contortionist.  She retired from performing in 1891 and with her husband mentored a new generation of circus performers, including her daughter.  In 1899 they settled in Brussels, where Olga ran a café-restaurant and continued her teaching.  She died in 1945 aged 86. 

It makes complete sense, then, to ask the question about this encounter, Who was ‘the artist’, painter or aerialist?  ‘To what degree’, asks the catalogue, ‘must we consider the work a collaboration between two artists?’

Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando was shown at the Fourth Impressionist Exhibition in Partis in April 1879.  It didn’t get much attention, didn’t sell, and came back to Degas’s studio, where it stayed for 24 years.  At last, in 1905, it was sold in a London exhibition to a wealthy young Toronto businessman, Cawthra Mulock.  With others Mulock was planning to build a new theatre in Toronto, the Royal Alexandra Theatre.  The catalogue speculates that he bought Miss La La not out of any aesthetic motivation but because he admired the architecture of the Cirque Fernando as Degas had depicted it.  The painting was finally bought from Mulock’s widow by Samuel Courtauld for the National Gallery in 1925.

Miss La La was clearly far ahead of its time.  The catalogue doesn’t pursue the question of why Degas made no more circus paintings, but you suspect that the failure of his great picture to gain attention and sale was partly to blame.  Or perhaps he felt that he’d never be able to surpass what he (and she) had achieved in Miss La La, and needed to retreat to other, more approachable subjects.