Seeing Degas As Never Before

By ROBERT HUGHES

Whatever else may be wrong with the late American art industry, we are living in the golden age of the retrospective exhibition. One by one, the great artists of the 19th century have been done over the past decade: Cezanne, Manet, Courbet, Van Gogh, Gauguin -- and now Edgar Degas. We may deplore the crowds at these shows, the souvenir selling, the social circus and the TeleTron tickets at up to $7.75 apiece, an outrageous tax on knowledge. Earplugs -- preferably not attached to Acoustiguide gadgets -- and yogic detachment are needed. There are, as crusty old Degas said, some kinds of success that are indistinguishable from panic. But such shows will not be repeated in our lifetime.

Not in 50 years has there been a major Degas retrospective, and probably never again will so many of his drawings, paintings, prints and sculptures be assembled in one place at one time as in the huge show of more than 300 works that opens this week at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Nor are we likely to see again such a massive scholarly effort -- literally massive: the catalog, with its essays by art historians Jean Sutherland Boggs, Douglas Druick, Henri Loyrette, Michael Pantazzi and Gary Tinterow, weighs a tad over 6 lbs. Thanks to their efforts and those of the three museums that mutually organized the show -- the Musee d'Orsay, the National Gallery of Canada and the Met -- we have the means to see this extraordinarily complicated and sometimes elusive painter with a completeness not possible before.

It is curious that it should have taken so long. There was not even a full- scale biography of Degas until 1984, when Roy McMullen's Degas: His Life, Times & Work was published. Aspects of Degas's work -- mainly his ballet paintings from the 1880s -- have long been popular with a broad audience, too much so for their own good. But he has never been a "popular" artist like the wholly inferior Renoir, whose 1985 retrospective in London, Paris and Boston beguiled the crowds and disappointed everyone else. Degas was much harder to take, with his spiny intelligence (never Renoir's problem), his puzzling mixtures of categories, his unconventional cropping, his "coldness." The long continuities of his work have not always been obvious. Degas was the most modern of artists, but his kind of modernity, entailing a passionate working relationship with the past, hardly exists today. How we would have bored him, with our feeble jabber of postmodernist "appropriation"!

In his late years, Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas was chatting in his studio with one of his few friends and many admirers, the English painter Walter Richard Sickert. When they decided to visit a cafe, young Sickert got ready to summon a horse-drawn cab. Degas objected. "Personally, I don't like cabs. You don't see anyone. That's why I love to ride on the omnibus -- you can look at people. We were created to look at one another, weren't we?" No passing remark could take you closer to the heart of 19th century realism: the idea of the artist as an engine for looking, a being whose destiny was to study what Balzac, in a famous phrase that declared its rebellion from the theological order of Dante's Divine Comedy, called La Comedie Humaine.

The idea that the goal of creative effort lay outside the field of allegory and moral precept was quite new in the 1860s, when Degas was coming to maturity as a painter. The highest art was still history painting, in which France had reigned supreme; but since 1855 practically the whole generation of history painters on whom this elevation depended -- above all, Delacroix and Ingres -- had died, and no one seemed fit to replace them. French critics and artists alike, and conservative ones in particular, felt a tremor of crisis, & as others would a century later as the masters of modernism died off. After them, what could sustain the momentum of culture?

And yet, beyond the ruins of the temple, something else was stirring: a sense of the century as unique in itself, full of what Baudelaire called the "Heroism of Modern Life." Its chief bearers, in painting, were to be Manet and Degas.

Born in 1834 into a rich Franco-Italian banking family with branches in Paris, Naples and New Orleans, Degas was never short of money, and he never doubted his vocation as a painter, in which his family encouraged him. He was a shy, insecure and aloof young man; if one did not know this from the testimony of his friends, one would gather it from his early self-portraits, with their veiled look of mannerist inwardness acquired from Pontormo. It seems he was unusually devoid of narcissism: unlike almost every other 19th century painter one has heard of, he gave up painting his own face at 31. It was the Other that fascinated him, all faces except his own.

In time he would construct a formidable "character" to mask his shyness: Degas the solitary, the feared aphorist, the Great Bear of Paris. He never married -- "I would have been in mortal misery all my life for fear my wife might say, 'That's a pretty little thing,' after I had finished a picture." He had a reputation for misogyny, mainly because he rejected the hypocrisy about formal beauty embedded in the salon nudes of Bouguereau or Cabanel -- ideal wax with little rosy nipples. "Why do you paint women so ugly, Monsieur Degas?" some hostess unwisely asked. "Because, madam, women in general are ugly." This was a blague, a put-on.

To find Degas's true feelings about women, one should consult the pastels and oil paintings of nudes that he made, at the height of his powers, in the 1880s and '90s. Their bodies are radiant, worked almost to a thick crust of pastel matte and blooming with myriad strokes within their tough winding contours. But they are also mechanisms of flesh and bone, all joints, protuberances, hollows, neither "personalities" nor pinups. (One sees why Duchamp, inventor of the mechanical bride, adored and copied Degas.)

Not even Nude Woman Having Her Hair Combed, circa 1886-88, the most refined and classical of these nudes, seems in the least Renoiresque, though nothing could be more appealing than that pink, slightly blockish body against the gold couch and the regulating white planes of peignoir and apron. It was a subject to which Degas brought special, almost fetishistic feeling, and a later version of the same theme, The Coiffure, 1896, shows what a vehicle for innovation it could be: the contours of the woman and her maid are now roughed out with an almost fauve abruptness, and they emerge from a continuous orange- russet field that seems to predict Matisse's Red Studio, 1911.

Degas's "keyhole" bathers provoked the crisis of the Ideal Nude, whose last great exponent had been the man Degas most revered, Ingres. Yet their exquisite clarity of profile could not have been achieved without Ingres's example. In them, the great synthesis between two approaches that 30 years before had been considered the opposed poles of French art -- Ingres's classical line, Delacroix's romantic color -- is achieved. There is no clearer instance of the way in which true innovators like Degas do not destroy the past (as the mythology of avant-gardism insisted): they amplify it.

Nothing escaped Degas's prehensile eye for the texture of life and the myriad gestures that reveal class and work. He made art from things that no painter had fully used before: the way a discarded dress, still warm from the now naked body, keeps some of the shape of its wearer; the unconcern of a dancer scratching her back between practice sessions in The Dance Class, 1873-76; the tension in a relationship between a man and a woman (Sulking, 1869-71) or the undercurrent of violence in an affair (Interior, sometimes known as The Rape, 1868-69); a laundress's yawn; the stoned heaviness of an absinthe drinker's posture before the dull green phosphorescence of her glass; the exact port of a dandy's cane; the professional absorption of the petits rats of the ballet corps; the look in a whore's eye as she sizes up her client; the revealing clutter on a writer's desk.

Degas did not suddenly become a realist. What happened was more subtle: gradually this quintessential young bourgeois discovered what was to be seen from the eyeline of the bourgeoisie. But his eye for the instant gesture and socially revealing incident went with a lifelong habit of recycling poses and motifs, patching them in. Thus he can be very deceptive: the image that seems the freshest product of observation turns out to have been used half a dozen times before. Degas copied everything from Mantegna to Mogul miniatures, and even the work of lesser painters than himself; an artist, he said, should not be allowed to draw so much as a radish without the constant habit of copying the Old Masters.

Allegory, in his early work, went with the desire to see freshly -- and it would return in strange forms in his old age, like the 1896-98 painting of a fallen jockey whose horse may distantly refer to one of the steeds of the Apocalypse, or the Russian Dancers of 1899, three women in clumping boots, locked together in a straining mass like Goya's witches. Both the allegory and the freshness can be found in his first real masterpiece, done in 1858-67 after he got back to Paris from his studies in Rome: The Bellelli Family, that marvelously observed group portrait of his neurotic aunt Laura, her lazy and distracted husband Gennaro and their two daughters. For though it is a tour de force of realist observation -- how much more concrete and present the Bellellis seem to us, surrounded by the furniture and other stuff of their lives, than the people on the neutral brown grounds Manet borrowed from Velazquez! -- it is also an allegory of family continuity under stress. The drawing on the wall behind Laura Bellelli is Degas's grandfather Hilaire, and she is pregnant, so that four generations, not two, are present in the picture.

You cannot fail to associate this with Degas's own working methods, the sense of filiation and descent that would breathe through his work for the rest of his life, the past feeding into the present and then out into the future. Degas, the synthesizer of Ingres and Delacroix, would point -- through the wild color fields and direct manual touch of his later years -- to a modernism that was not yet born.