Discover Degas and Miss La La

Fabulous exhibition at the National Gallery focusing on Degas’s painting of 1879 “Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando”.

The show started by looking at Miss La La, a famous acrobat whose real name was Anna Albertine Olga Brown, using photographs of her and posters from her shows to tell her story. It then looked at the circus in Paris and how it influenced artists.

The main section was an appropriately circular space with the painting at the centre. Around it were the studies Degas did at the circus and in his studio to create the work. As La La was a woman of in colour the show then looks at Degas’s trip to family in New Orleans, how he saw more people of colour there and how that influenced his art.

The show finished with a section on how the painting influenced later artists and included a Duncan Grant painting of elephants in the circus that I’d never seen before.

Closed 1 September 2024


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