While most of Degas: A Strange New Beauty at the Museum of Modern Art (to July 24) assembles the artist’s usual cast of characters—dancers and singers, acquaintances and nudes (often in ungainly poses)—two sections at the end of this thoroughly engrossing show of the artist’s monotypes reveal aspects of his work that are less familiar (as discussed by curator Jodi Hauptman in this CultureGrrl Video).
The most baffling chapter in the exhibition (and in Degas’ oeuvre) examines his brothel scenes, which were “unexhibited until after his death,” according to the show’s catalogue.
You can see why he preferred to keep these caricature-ish, unsettling scenes to himself:
“Whether Degas humanizes and honors these women, as Renoir believed, or deplores them for their indecent poses remains a question [emphasis added],” according to the wall text for another monotype from this bawdy, tawdry series. But the answer to that “question” may, in fact, be: “Neither.”
A more convincing interpretation was posited in a 2010 show that I saw at the Clark Art Institute —Picasso Looks at Degas, which also displayed some of these problematic works. That show’s curators advanced the theory that these backroom glimpses reveal the artist as curious, possibly impotent, voyeur. In her catalogue essay for the Clark’s show (co-curated with Richard Kendall, who also co-organized MoMA’s current show), independent scholar Elizabeth Cowling observed that “the most assiduous research by Degas scholars has not thrown up the name of a single mistress.”
Here’s another voyeuristic peek:
Photo by Lee Rosenbaum
As evidenced by the Clark show, Picasso was fascinated by Degas’ brothel monotypes, which likely served as inspiration for the sexual shenanigans in his “Suite 347” prints, in which Degas himself occasionally appears. At the Clark’s press preview, Kendall suggested that Picasso, who prided himself on virility, might, in old age, have reluctantly identified with Degas’ incapacity.
Image from the Clark’s “Picasso Looks at Degas” catalogue
Two works owned by MoMA are the centerpiece of the show’s most jaw-dropping gallery, which focuses on another lesser-known Degas subject—landscapes. For these monotypes, the medium was oil paint, not black printers’ ink—“an innovation in printmaking,” as the wall text states.
Uncharacteristically for Degas, some of these landscapes border on abstraction:
R: “Forest in the Mountains,” c. 1890, Museum of Modern Art
Photos by Lee Rosenbaum
Here’s a closer look at the print on the right, which, despite its incongruousness (and perhaps because of its ownership), MoMA has chosen as a signature image for its show:
Curator Hauptman calls the obtrusive green blotch a “smoosh.” To me, it looks to be an elephant who has wandered onto the wrong continent. The label acknowledges that “this green area seems to have little narrative function in the composition.”
It seems to have been an experimental accident: “A large amount of emerald oil paint was applied to the plate….As the paper and plate were tightly sandwiched by the rollers, it spread across the composition,” according to the label.
The wall text introducing the “Landscapes” section suggests that their pioneering abstract quality sprung from Degas’ impressions while gazing at the countryside from a moving horse-drawn carriage and the door of a moving train. But that seemed to me an insufficient explanation for this radical departure. I privately wondered if the late Degas (like the late Monet, whose problem with cataracts temporarily imparted a yellow cast to some of his works) had an a vision disorder that affected his output.
Responding to my previous musings about this abrupt shift, CultureGrrl reader Cecilia Wong, an LA-based writer on art, science and technology (including “biological experiments that may give clue to how art is made”), sent me a medical journal article by Dr. Michael Marmor titled: Ophthalmology and Art: Simulation of Monet’s Cataracts and Degas’ Retinal Disease.
Marmor posits that Degas likely suffered from “a progressive retinal disease that caused central (macular) damage.” He asserts that “changes in Degas’ style correlated rather closely with this progressive loss of vision….Nothing in Degas’ correspondence indicated that he was consciously trying to be more expressionistic or abstract.”
Still, it’s hard to believe that he had no idea what was going on with this squall of paint:
Photo by Lee Rosenbaum
This, one of the least abstract landscapes in the show, was my favorite, bringing to my mind the sublime perspectives of America’s Hudson River School painters:
Photo by Lee Rosenbaum
If all this whets your appetite for a more comprehensive Degas survey, you’ll have to head over to the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia (June 14-Sept. 18) or the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (Oct. 16-Jan. 8) to see Degas: A New Vision. Featuring some 200 paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture and photographs from international public and private collections, that show is billed as “the most significant international survey of the work of Edgar Degas in over three decades.”
The last such show was the sweeping 1988 retrospective organized by two of the principals for this year’s edition—Gary Tinterow, former Metropolitan Museum curator, who now directs the MFAH, and Henri Loyrette, former director of the Louvre. Co-organizing the 1988 show with them was the late Jean Sutherland Boggs, former director of the National Gallery of Canada.