It has happened more than once in the last couple of years that your reporter took refuge from a museum’s big event by ducking into a side gallery. The Clark Art Institute, for instance, has an outsize exhibition up of Guillaume Lethière, a late-eighteenth-century history painter with a thousand equals. The Clark would likely be paying no attention to him if not for his birth to a white plantation owner and a mixed-race slave on Grande-Terre Island in Guadeloupe. One exhibition hall is painted Cocotte Red, another Camaro Teal, and another Manischewitz Concord Grape. It is, in short, the usual product of culture-war marching orders from the Mellon and Ford foundations, executed according to the clownish aesthetic vogue that has all but overtaken exhibition designers these days. But elsewhere in the museum is “Edgar Degas: Multi-Media Artist in the Age of Impressionism,” a modest, fulfilling show with a technical focus presented on walls painted a color I can’t recall, which, I would remind the Clark, is the point.
“Multi-media” typically conjures visions of video projections and assemblage, but the designation is apt in Degas’ case. Degas made photographs. He would sometimes work oil and soft pastel into the same piece of paper. He seemed intent on pushing the limits of intaglio to the point of violation, as shown in several samples from twenty states of a drypoint and aquatint, Leaving the Bath, from 1879–80.
Though many of the works shown are from Clark holdings, notable exceptions include At the Dressmaker’s, from a private collection in New York. The pastel is dated 1882, with the right side reworked sometime in the 1890s. It exemplifies how Degas’ dedication to pictorial radicalism, so central to the Impressionist project, finally escaped even the newer dicta of Impressionism. The subject hails from prosaic modern life, certainly, and the mark-making is bold in the extreme. But the palette ranges from soot to sand, creating a low-contrast atmosphere of extraordinary lusciousness. At the Clark, one can compare it with Renoirs from the same period, as that other Impressionist pushed towards ill-advised specificity of drawing and increasingly simplistic coloration. The main flourish of At the Dressmaker’s is the ashen fabric stretched over the back of the central figure, demonstrating that Degas, at least in the decade leading to 1900, could extract more resonance from gray than Renoir could from red. Degas also worked from models but thought little of painting from the motif out in the countryside. A Degas is a construction and an abstraction. The answer to the question of whether his works are made from life is complicated.
Speaking of abstraction, the exhibition also features a monotype in oil from 1890, The Road in the Forest, from the Fogg. One can detect the road and accept that there is a forest, but this image is very nearly not a figurative picture. It feels closer in spirit to the kind of paintings that Rothko and Baziotes were making five or six decades later, with delicate dapples of oil presented to be experienced as such. It was probably rendered entirely with a rag, with lines incised in a few places with a point or a fingernail. It conveys with particular acuity a quality that Degas, among the Impressionists, achieves to a unique degree: the lingering material presence of the artist, working on the spot from where the viewer is looking. The Clark’s Rouen Cathedral, the Façade in Sunlight (ca. 1892–94) by Monet certainly has a physical presence, but it is more the painting’s than the artist’s. The Road in the Forest is refulgent with a sense of hand.
Degas’ personality was famously acerbic. He is recorded, among other things, insulting Whistler’s faint masculinity. But “Multi-Media Artist” puts it aside and documents instead his accomplishments as a friend and collaborator. An especially interesting example is Woman Emptying a Wheelbarrow (1880), a drypoint and aquatint by Camille Pissarro. Degas owned eight impressions of the print and possibly worked alongside Pissarro on his own intaglio as they goaded each other into trying ever more nontraditional tools and methods. Next to a drypoint by Paul César Helleu portraying the painter Henri Rouart, a wall label recounts a letter that Degas wrote to Rouart from the same year as the Pissarro print:
The heart is like many instruments. It must be polished and used a lot so that it gleams and runs well. As for mine, it is you that polishes it, rather than its owner.
The exhibition doesn’t discuss it, but current events oblige us to recall that the friendship between Degas and Pissarro ended over the Dreyfus Affair. After Pissarro died in 1903, Degas wrote to Rouart,
What went on inside that old Israelite head of his? Did he think only of going back to the old times when we were pretty nearly unaware of his terrible race?
Probably most people who know this sorry episode of the Impressionist period imagine that they would have been Dreyfusards. But with so many artists responding to Hamas’s October 2023 assault on Israel by abominating “Zionists,” one ought to think of Degas’ dismaying example and not be too sure. What fruitful artistic collaborations will be forfeited in the latest panic about the Jews?
Nevertheless, the Clark presents Degas at his best as a man and an artist, as it should. The Laundress (ca. 1869–75), on loan from the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, features deft brushing of black and white gouache on paper that the artist oiled into a glowing ochre. The subject is a woman ironing, looking past the viewer with a weary but ingenuous expression. Every part of the drawing is magnificent. The concision of the contours of the figure’s left arm is perfection. No matter how much history, recent and distant, inheres to the presentation of such mastery, it retains its power to knock it all away, leaving only awareness of its sublimity.
