Like the Frick Collection’s Van Dyck show (discussed here), the Museum of Modern Art’s Degas: A Strange New Beauty (to July 24) is informed by the discerning eye of a prints-and-drawings curator who provides new insights into a celebrated painter’s sensibility and working methods through close examination of his more experimental works on paper.
Both shows are visually exciting and, thanks to their curators’ sharp interpretive skills, intellectually stimulating.
At MoMA, Jodi Hauptman, senior curator of drawings and prints (with senior conservator Karl Buchberg, also her trusty sidekick for last year’s blockbuster, Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs) reveals how Degas’ radical innovations in his intimate, enigmatic monotypes informed his more familiar oil-on-canvas renderings of dancers and bathers. (Also co-organizing the show was Degas specialist Richard Kendall, independent scholar and curator.) Some 180 works from 89 lenders are explored in the show and its catalogue.
The expansive final gallery, exploring the influence of the monotypes on Degas’ larger oeuvre, provides a grand coda, giving a sense of release after the close, intense looking (magnifiers supplied) required by the dense black-and-white prints that constitute the bulk of this thematically organized show.
Here’s one of the familiar paintings that you’ll encounter in the final gallery:
[All photos by Lee Rosenbaum]
You can enjoy this show strictly for its considerable visual pleasures, or allow yourself to be fascinated by the curators’ wonky labels, expanding your understanding with more than you ever thought you’d want to know about the thought processes and mechanics behind Degas’ monomaniacal monotypes obsession.
The progenitor of this preoccupation (which lasted from the mid-1870s to mid-1880s and resurfaced briefly in the early 1890s) was this hybrid creation:
Close scrutiny reveals an oddity: Degas shared the authorship honors with his artistic collaborator on this print, Ludovic-Napoléon Lepic, whom the curators credit with having “introduced Degas to the monotype.”
Lepic’s signature appears at the upper left:
As elucidated on a touchscreen in the galleries, there are two types of Degas monotypes: In dark-field monotypes (screen illustration below), “ink is applied to the entire plate and then selectively removed to create an image,” as the show’s wall text tells us.
In the light-field monotype, “the image is drawn with ink directly on the plate, usually with a brush.” Degas often combined these two methods in the same print.
Notwithstanding the oneness implied by “monotype,” Degas sometimes created two or more images based on the same plate. One of the great curatorial coups of MoMA’s show was tracking down and temporarily reuniting Degas “cognates,” in which a second pulling of a black-and-white impression is embellished with colored pastel.
I savored the rare chance afforded by this show to compare such duos. The delicately colored renderings are more ingratiatingly attractive, but the stark contrasts and concentrated intensity of the tougher black-and-white monotypes create a heightened sense of drama, giving them a more “modern” (rather than “Impressionist”) aspect.
Here’s one of the show’s “cognate” pairs:
And here’s another cognate pair. (My apologies for the reflections on the glass in my photo of the top work.):
A particularly interesting trio at MoMA also illustrates that monotypes are not always “mono.” Degas’ “Woman Reading” exists here in three distinct images—the first pull…
…and a double-sided image, made by “sandwiching a clean sheet between the still-wet print and the plate,” according to the label. The first pull (seen in the above image) is to the left on the wall below. The “counterproof”—a mirror image—is to the right, on a free-standing pedestal:
On the other side of the counterproof sheet is a ghostlike second image of the original monotype:
“Degas’ interest in repetition and variation—lessons learned from his monotypes” (in the curators’ words) found expression in one of his largest paintings, which is on view in the final gallery:
The monotypes’ influence can also be seen in the Getty’s painting of a bather (near the top of this post), which adopts “strategies used in his monotypes of dark-field bathers….Bodies are similarly twisted and stretched, and the rendering is more tonal than linear.” To me, the mottled background and the dark lines delineating the figures also seem akin to the monotypes.
But there are two groups of monotypes in the show that are like nothing else in Degas’ oeuvre. They raise thorny issues of interpretation that I don’t think the curators have entirely resolved.
COMING SOON: Part II—The two most puzzling and insufficiently explained sections of MoMA’s Degas show.