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Visual Arts :: The Real Degas? Was French artist Edgar Degas the most conservative Impressionist? Or was he the most radical? A number of new exhibitions suggest that he could have been both. "Edgar Degas: Six Friends at Dieppe" at the RISD Museum of Art, Providence, RI, through January 15, 2006. by Peter Walsh
On the other hand, Degas' reputation as a painter of leggy ballerinas obscures just how far he really traveled from the safe and conventional. Take a second look, and a very different artist stands out. By the time Degas made it his subject matter, the Paris Opera Ballet had degenerated into a kind of high-class escort service. The customers for his ballerina pictures were apparently the same sort of top-hatted men-about-Paris who bought season tickets, giving them the privilege of meeting the dancers backstage. Like Degas' gritty paintings of prostitutes, cafe singers, laundresses, milliners, and lonely absinthe drinkers, the ballerinas are really about the socially declasse and the conspicuously invisible; working women clinging for dear life to the dingy margins of Paris society. The complexities of Degas' life and career are tied up in a major piece he made at a Normandy coastal resort in the late summer of 1885. The work, a large pastel known since 1931 as "Six Friends at Dieppe," is an all-male group portrait of Degas' friends and fellow vacationers that season. Apart from the powerful draftsmanship, the most striking thing about this work is the composition, which seems radical even today. Five of the figures are crammed into the right half of the canvas, their heads barely making it into the frame. The sixth figure stands alone in the left half, with his back to the others. Instead of facing outward, as in conventional portraits, the six men gaze in six different directions. None of them looks directly out of the picture or at each other. The picture plane seems oddly tilted, breaking the normal perspective illusion of a window into space. You, the viewer, stand directly over the figures in the foreground, as if you were part of the picture.
What is Degas really up to? Critics have attributed his odd compositions, which sometimes crop the faces off his figures and seem to arrest his subjects in the midst of random, restless movements, to his avid interest in photography. But professional photographers didn't begin to exploit such "botched snapshot" effects until the late 20th century. And Degas' compositions are hardly accidental. They are carefully and mysteriously controlled. The piece seems stranger and more fascinating the longer you look at it. "Six Friends," purchased by the Rhode Island School of Design Museum nearly 50 years after it was created, is explored in three ambitious exhibitions at RISD this fall. "Edgar Degas: Six Friends at Dieppe" and two smaller shows, "French Drawing in the Time of Degas" and "Japonisme: Japanese Prints and their Influence in 19th-century France ." Together, they assemble a mass of social, personal, and art history. The show identifies the subjects of the work, including Degas' childhood classmate Ludovic Halevy, who had become a prominent Opera librettist and author, Halevy's 12-year-old son, Daniel, government censor of theatre and concert performances Albert Boulanger-Cave, young British painter and Degas-admirer Walter Sickert, and two French artists, Jacques-Emile Blanche and Henri Gervex. The exhibition is what's known in the trade as a "context" show and traces what can be recovered from that lost September of 1885. It reconstructs the days Degas spent with his subjects, their families, and other friends from his own social class at the fashionable seaside resort of Dieppe, on the Normandy coast. The depth of that context contains everything from the development of Normandy resorts during the Second Empire, the architecture of the hulking, neo-Norman villas occupied by the Blanche and Halevy families, contemporary photographs (taken by a hired professional), diaries and published accounts, to Daniel Halevy's charming 1953 letter to a RISD director, the elder Halevy's operas, and the work of Blanche, Gervex, Sickert, and, of course, Degas. Even Degas' ballerinas turn up, surrounded by their off-stage admirers in evening dress, as proposed illustrations to Ludovic Halevy's popular ballet stories. At the same time, the show has to leave out what you would really like to know about that long-ago seaside gathering. What dangerous gossip was exchanged on those long walks along the shore? What witticisms and insights crossed the dinner table? Why is Sickert, the only member of the group besides Degas still widely considered important, portrayed standing alone? Was Degas making a wry comment on the relative talents of Blanche and Gervex, bourgeois painters who made comfortable careers by paddling around the edges of modernism without ever getting wet? And how did the many intelligent women from that summer's gathering, who are said to have adored Degas, feel about being excluded from his memento of their sojourn? A thorough and admirable effort, "Six Friends" ends up a reminder of how little the average person can really absorb in an hour or two at an art exhibition. Really appreciating the context of Degas' work requires you not just to take in all that has been arranged and presented, but also to understand the political and class structures of the Third Republic, the changing nature of the French art system, and half a dozen weightier subjects. Such rich, Proustian material seems to cry out for something beyond scholarship or even facts; possibly a thick novel or a Merchant-Ivory film. Perhaps it is only in the imagination that the real Degas can stand up. "Edgar Degas: Six Friends at Dieppe" is on display at the RISD Museum of Art, Providence, RI, through January 15, 2006. "French Drawing in the Time of Degas" and "Japonisme: Japanese Prints and their Influence in 19th-century France" are on view through February 12, 2006.
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