Today’s automatic washers and dryers take care of our laundry, but anyone who has sopped up the watery overflow of a washing machine with towels or laboriously wrung out handwashed sheets can relate to the heaviness of wet laundry and the muscular effort needed to handle it.
A very human scale to life in Paris in the late 1800s makes personal the just-opened exhibition “Degas and the Laundress: Women, Work and Impressionism” at the Cleveland Museum of Art. That’s when Edgar Degas and his fellow Impressionists began to reflect contemporary urban life of the city rather than the conservative pastoral landscapes and still lifes of the earlier era.
The ballerinas for which Degas is best known are nowhere to be seen in this exhibit, which instead portrays the mundane tasks of laundresses in 100 paintings, early photos and ephemera from Degas and his Impressionist colleagues.
Laundresses at work were the backdrop of urban Paris in the last decades of the 19th century. Their effort is clearly shown in this exhibit.
It’s the first time these works from 30 collections have been seen together.
In Degas’ “Woman Ironing,” the painting used by CMA to promote this exhibit, Degas painted the arms of his favorite model, Emma Dobigny, as an outline to evoke the repetitive motion of using a 7-pound hot iron to press out wrinkles from fresh washed laundry.
According to exhibition curator Britany Salsbury, CMA’s curator of prints and drawings, this early composition preoccupied Degas for decades and rarely left his studio. It’s the first time this painting, owned by Munich’s Neue Pinakothek art museum, has traveled to Cleveland.
Although Degas used models for much of his work, some paintings show an almost voyeuristic approach to subjects, which the artist described as “peeking through a keyhole” to make it appear they didn’t know they were being observed.
Laundresses hauling their washing, hanging it to dry and then ironing it were part of the everyday backdrop of Paris when Degas and other Impressionists captured them doing their work.
Most laundresses worked to wash laundry in the Seine River, which runs through Paris, paying for space to wash the clothing, tablecloths, curtains and sheets in bateaux-lavoir boats on the Seine. Considered ugly and unhygienic, the boats were moved down the river to the edge of the city, where laundresses had to haul their loads up and down steep steps, all while minding their small children, who could not be left behind. Coal stoves — a burn danger to mother and child — were used to heat the irons they used, and the air inside the boats was smoky and humid. The work was so difficult, dangerous and poorly paid that many of the women had to supplement their income with prostitution.
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While fetching laundry from the homes of more prosperous customers, the laundresses needed to enter those homes unescorted — considered highly improper and part of the reason for their dodgy reputations as sex workers. Until Degas began portraying the strenuous work they did, laundresses often were considered to be flirtatious and have loose morals.
In “Women Ironing,” Degas depicted the experience of walking down a Paris street and peeking into a doorway. He contrasted the strenuous labor of one woman with the yawning of another woman who holds a bottle of wine. Wine was often used to pay laundresses to offset the unpleasantness of the work. The same model was apparently used for both figures, Salsbury pointed out.
The proximity of many of the artists’ studios to the places where laundresses lived and worked helped the artists realize and portray their complexity.
A receipt from a laundry near Degas' studio is one of the pieces of ephemera in the “Laundress” show. The artist used early photographs, displayed throughout the exhibit, to study motion and learn how to portray it.
“Laundresses on the Banks of the Seine With a View of Notre Dame” is a photograph from 1900 showing a pair of laundresses on the banks of the Seine with distant landmarks of Paris in the background. Landscape imagery played an important role in early photography by evoking painting through blurred focus and dramatic contrast. Placement of the women, close to the viewer but far from the city’s distant landmarks, reflects their characterization as figures who were important but who fit awkwardly into contemporary urban life.
Pierre Auguste Renoir’s “Laundress and Her Child” portrays Aline Charigot, the wife of the artist, holding the couple’s young son, Pierre. After being abandoned as a child, she moved to Paris and worked as a laundress in a shop near the artist’s studio. The laundry being hung by her co-workers in the painting’s background alludes to her occupation before the changes in her life as a wife and mother. The painting is from the Cleveland Museum of Art’s own collection.
Salsbury said the downward perspective in “Hanging the Laundry out to Dry” suggests that artist Berthe Morisot was viewing the scene from a window or balcony. Black smoke from distant factories shows the industrialization that had begun in the Paris suburbs by the late 1800s as laundry workers hang their clean linens in the foreground. The viewpoint suggests the contrast between upper-middle-class women such as the artist and the workers she depicted.
‘Degas and the Laundress: Women, Work and Impressionism’
When: Through Jan. 14.
Where: Cleveland Museum of Art, 11150 East Blvd.
Tickets: $15 for adults; $12 for seniors, students and children ages 6 through 17; free for museum members and children 5 and under. A $25 combo ticket is available through Jan. 7 for this exhibit and “China’s Southern Paradise: Treasures from the Lower Yangzi Delta.”
Info: clevelandart.org or 216-421-7350.
