MoMA’s Degas Monotypes Press Conference: My Cantankerous Cameo (with video)

I’ve already awarded myself the Hilton Kramer Award for Old Fogey-ism. Lately, I’ve been feeling more and more like the Helen Thomas of art journalism. Thomas, UPI‘s (and later, Hearst Newspapers‘) veteran White House correspondent, was a persistent gadfly, notorious for asking the first or second questions at Presidential news conferences. (Hopefully, my career won’t meet a similarly ignominious end.)

My sense of identification with Thomas was cemented today at the Museum of Modern Art, courtesy of a playful remark to me by director Glenn Lowry at the press conference following the press preview of the Degas monotypes show (opening Saturday, to July 24).

Taking my question, which came uncharacteristically late in the Q&A, Glenn exclaimed:

Thank, you Lee, I was wondering! I could not go through a morning without a question from you.

Caught off-guard (and even more astonished later, when I discovered that the entire press conference had been videoed by MoMA and posted on YouTube), I parried Glenn with a quip of my own, before posing my question:

I wanted [to know] a little more about the reason for the abstraction in the landscapes: It’s such a striking change. The “moving train” is one thing. [Degas said that the view from a moving train had inspired his landscapes, which are Turner-like in their blurry beauty.] But was there something deeper going on? What drove that move to abstraction which, as you [Jodi] said, was very radical?

My query referred to the climactic “Landscapes” section of the museum’s engrossing and revelatory Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty, which includes these two enigmatic MoMA-owned works:

I’ve always believed that the sign of a good question is an interesting answer, which mine elicited, thanks to the thoughtful, detailed response of Jodi Hauptman (of Matisse Cut-Outs fame), the show’s curator, who was again working with her “Matisse” sidekick, Karl Buchberg, MoMA’s senior conservator.

In her answer, Hauptman described Degas as “someone who was deeply attuned to how his materials worked and then how to transgress them—how to make them do something that they were not meant to do,” as in mysterious “green smoosh,” as she called it, in the landscape above on the right.

You can hear Jodi and Karl (and Glenn and me) in that part of the conversation, starting at 33:43 in this MoMA video: