An Impressionist Abroad

By ROBERT HUGHES

There are thousands of paintings by French Impressionists in American collections, public and private; America's infatuation with Impressionism, which began more than a century ago, has never stopped. Yet only one member of the Impressionist group ever visited America, and it wasn't for artistic reasons. Edgar Degas (1834-1917) had relatives in New Orleans. His father Auguste De Gas--who, despite the "De" he affected, was not of noble blood--had married a French-Creole woman from New Orleans, Celestine Musson. She produced three sons and two daughters, of whom Edgar was the oldest. They were all raised in Paris, but both of Edgar's younger brothers, Rene and Achille, emigrated to New Orleans and went into the Musson family business, the cotton trade. Rene went back to Paris on business and persuaded his artist brother to go on a visit to New Orleans.

And so, in 1872, off they went on the transatlantic packet Scotia, bound for New York City. Edgar Degas was then 38, a promising but not a well-known artist, and not at all the enormous figure in French art that he would become. But there was never a time in his life when he did not work, and he kept painting and drawing throughout his five-month sojourn among his brothers and cousins in New Orleans. Hence the shapely and interesting show on view through Aug. 29 at the New Orleans Museum of Art: "Degas and New Orleans." It consists only of some 40 paintings and drawings; it is, as curator Gail Feigenbaum puts it, a "cabinet exhibition," but one that's clearly focused and well worth seeing.

Hovering behind its presentation is the vaguely boosterish feeling that Degas felt some unusual affinity to New Orleans and to Louisiana in general. "Louisiana must be respected by all her children," he wrote to his friend Henri Rouart in Paris, "and I am almost one of them." Alas, it's Degas being ironic. The sentences before make this clear: speaking of New Orleans women, he wrote that "their heads are as weak as mine, which a deux would prove a strange guarantee for a new home."

But still, his family (or part of it) was there, and the look of the town and its people delighted the great realist. He wrote to James Tissot, a fellow painter, enthusiastically about "villas with columns in different styles...negroes in old clothes...rosy white children in black arms, charabancs or omnibuses drawn by mules, the tall funnels of the steamboats towering at the end of the main street... Everything is beautiful in this world of people." But, he typically added, one Paris laundress with bare arms "is worth it all for such a pronounced Parisian as I am." In any case the outdoor glare pained his weakening eyes, which is why all his paintings from New Orleans are either interiors or portraits. He never painted the black women whose appearance struck him so forcibly. He concentrated on his own relatives, especially Estelle Musson, Rene's blind wife, for whom he felt strong pity and sympathy--"She manages it in an unprecedented manner... And there is no hope!" Invalids, like the Woman with Bandage, figure largely in his New Orleans work, reminding you what a plague spot the delta city was.

The subject of his finest New Orleans painting was, however, what the French called le business--a cotton brokers' office at 63 Carondelet Street, belonging to the firm Musson, Prestidge, & Co., in which his own family was partners. (It looks like a commissioned work, but it wasn't: Degas hoped to sell it to one of the cotton magnates of Manchester, England, but he failed to.) Rene is there, smoking and reading a paper in the mid-foreground, and Achille leans idly on the windowsill at the left. It isn't exactly an image of American business dynamism: apart from the two men grading the cotton sample on the table and a pair of bookkeepers on the right, nobody seems to be doing much, and you can almost feel the languid Gulf heat in the room.

At the same time it's an extraordinary feat of composition--14 figures, full-length or nearly so, organized with perfect spatial coherence on a canvas only three feet wide, most of them identifiable and each a sharply characterized portrait. It is full of delicious details, down to the pattern and structure of the chair legs, and the beautiful still life of colored paper in the wastebasket.

No studies exist for any part of A Cotton Office in New Orleans, though it's inconceivable that Degas, who invariably worked up his compositions, would not have made them. The sketchbook must be lost. It may not be, as the catalog amiably suggests, a greater loss "than the missing links in Darwin's theory." But Degas is such a fascinating artist that one wants to know everything about him--which, not incidentally, is what makes this small show, dedicated to a brief episode in his life, such a pleasure to see.