Discover Degas & Miss La La review: 'enthralling' display of period photographs

Edgar Degas' "Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando" is "one of the wilder paintings in the National Gallery's collection", said Laura Freeman in The Times. Painted in 1879, it depicts the celebrated circus performer of its title "hanging on by her teeth" from a dangling rope, viewed from a "crick-your-neck perspective" that heightens the sense of jeopardy. Yet famous as the painting is, Miss La La herself has long since passed into obscurity. 

Born Anna Olga Albertina Brown to a white mother and an African-American father in Prussia, she gained fame as an acrobat in 1870s Paris, performing "death-defying stunts from a flying trapeze". This small but "scene-stealing" free show at the National Gallery attempts to show this fascinating figure "in the round", exploring her life and the particular circumstances that led Degas to portray her. His painting is displayed alongside preparatory sketches, archive material, photos and posters, resulting in a "top-notch" exhibition "put together with great showmanship". 

Degas' "breathtaking" painting gives the impression that it was created with total spontaneity, said Laura Cumming in the The Observer. Indeed, it's as though the artist is up there with her, "hanging mid-air in the moment". Yet, as we learn here, the composition was painstakingly achieved, the result of months of "sketching at the circus and painting at the studio". Degas even hired an architectural draughtsman to consult about his depiction of the dome of the Cirque Fernando – an auditorium also painted by the likes of Seurat, Picasso and Renoir; some of these works are in this show. But its real star is Olga, as La La was known offstage. One of only two black subjects Degas painted, she is represented here in an "enthralling" display of period photographs. The images document her life from circus stardom to old age, always showing her as "a model of intense professionalism, poise and dignity". 

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Olga was clearly "fearless", said Jackie Wullschläger in the Financial Times. For her act, a cannon would be attached to chains, which she would then grasp between her teeth while dangling upside down from a trapeze, and so keeping the cannon suspended in mid-air while it was fired. Her work was as dangerous as it looked: her stage partner died rehearsing a similar stunt to that depicted by Degas. The artist "loved to paint working women" and afforded his subjects "empathy and respect". Still, Miss La La stands out in his art: Degas "monumentalises her", rhyming her body with the circus's "curving arches", her costume's "gold trimming" flowing into its "gilded decor". It's exciting, too, to see the many drawings in which the artist refined his ideas for the final composition and, while the show makes an ideological attempt to reclaim "black models 'from the shadows'", neither Degas or Olga are "pinned down by cultural theory". Overall, this show is a "delight".