Exhibitions 1
The Private Collection of Edgar Degas (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, till 11 January 1998)
The great collector
Roger Kimball
Degas keeps it up,' a friend of the painter wrote in 1896, 'buying, buying. In the evening he asks himself how he will pay for what he bought that day, and the next morning he starts in again: more Ingres, some Delacroix, and El Greco this week. And then he takes a certain pride in announcing that he can no longer afford to clothe himself.' Long before Edgar Degas died, in 1917 when he was in his mid-eight- ies and almost totally blind, he had amassed one of the most extraordinary col- lections of modern art anywhere.
Degas often referred to his collection, installed on the ground floor of his huge apartment at 37 rue Victor Masse, as his `musee'. He even considered starting a museum to exhibit the work, but gave up the idea when he realised how much red tape would be involved. In the meantime, only a very few lucky friends were invited to see the art. Dozens of paintings and sketches by Degas's two chief idols, the coolly precisionist Ingres and the Romantic colourist Delacroix, led the list of works. But there were also masterpieces by amine, Sisley, Pissarro, Manet (Degas owned copies of nearly all Manet's graphic work), Mary Cassatt, Gauguin, Corot, Hiroshige, and thousands of lithographs by the illustrators Daumier and Paul Gavarni. Famously reluctant to part with his own work, Degas hoarded many of his best paintings, including 'Family Portrait (The Bellelli Family)', a spectacular picture from the late 1850s that is now in the Musee d'Orsay, and 'Interior' (also called 'The `Rape') now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
All in all, there were 8,000 works in the collection, 3,000 by Degas himself, many of which were entirely unknown until after his death. It took the combined efforts of Paris's three most important dealers — Bernheim-Jeune, Durand-Ruel, and Ambroise VoHard — and eight separate auctions over 18 months to dispose of the art. 'Degas Collection Sold', a newspaper headline shouted: 'Shelling of Paris Fails to Interfere with Art Sale.' While the Ger- mans bombarded Paris in 1918, curators from the National Gallery in London, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Louvre and many private collectors and dealers flocked to the sales. At the critic Roger Fry's behest, John Maynard Keynes arranged for a special £20,000 government grant for the National Gallery, whose acquisition budget had been suspended during the war. Keynes travelled to Paris with Charles Holmes, director of the National Gallery, and came back with near- ly 30 works by Ingres, Delacroix, Corot, Gauguin, Manet and others.
A tiny sample of Degas's collection was on view at the National Gallery last year when Ann Dumas organised Degas as a Collector, 40-odd pictures from the painter's collection that supplemented the great Degas: Beyond Impressionism exhibi- tion then making the rounds. Now Ms Dumas and her collaborators have gath- ered over 300 works for The Private Collec- tion of Edgar Degas, which naturally provides a much fuller overview of Degas's activity as a collector. It should be said straight off that, unlike many blockbusters, this exhibition leaves one feeling exhilarat- ed rather than exhausted. Not every item in the show is a masterpiece; Gauguin comes off looking a good deal cruder and more formulaic than one might have remem- bered; the two Van Goghs are pretty for- Madame Jacques-Louis Leblanc, 1823, by Ingres (Metropolitan Museum, New York) gettable; and some of the lithographs by Daumier and Gavarni are finally of greater sociological than aesthetic interest.
But such reservations seem almost beside the point when one is faced with so many extraordinary pictures. Everyone has had the experience of getting so absorbed in a long novel that, when the final chapters approach, one begins reading more slowly, reluctant to have the book end and the spell broken. This exhibition has a similiar effect: it's a large and demanding show, but one comes to the end wishing there were more.
The exhibition opens brilliantly with rooms full of paintings and drawings by Ingres, including several studies for 'The Apotheosis of Homer', a highly finished study for 'Roger Freeing Angelica', and the pendant portraits of M. and Mme Leblanc (1823), the acquisition of which Degas described as 'the event of my life as a col- lector'. Degas is generally considered the greatest draughtsman of his generation, and there is no doubt that his primary inspiration was Ingres. In later years, Degas was fond of recalling his meeting with the 75-year-old painter. 'Young man,' Ingres is supposed to have said to his young acolyte, 'never work from nature. Always from memory, or from the engrav- ings of the Old Masters.'
Degas followed Ingres's advice, diligently copying from the Old Masters, especially Ingres's own model, Raphael. Degas's rep- utation as an Impressionist and the allegro quality that suffuses many of his works has tended to obscure the deep technical mas- tery that serves as its foundation. 'I assure you,' Degas said in a letter to the Irish writ- er George Moore, 'that no art was ever less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and the study of the Great Masters.'
If Degas's art was anchored on one side by the chaste, classicising formality of Ingres, it was nourished on another side by the rich painterliness of Delacroix, who is represented in this exhibition by a stunning array of 50 works. Ingres once remarked that he regarded colour as a mere 'hand- maiden' of painting; for Delacroix, colour was something akin to its soul. Even at its most perfunctory, Degas's art has a kind of stateliness not found in Delacroix; but there is a passion and sumptuousness in Degas's work that comes in part from his intense immersion in what he called Delacroix's 'vibrant and vigorous style'. Part of the interest of this exhibition is as a chronicle of the development of Degas's sensibility. Some of his enthusiasms for the work of Ingres, Delacroix and Mallet, for example — were lifelong. Others were fleeting. Degas began by admiring the deft facility of James Tissot's work, but came in time to despise Tissot's increasing descent to sentimentality. Without doubt one of the highlight's of the exhibition is its culmina- tion: the several rooms devoted to 'Degas s Degases'. Everyone already knew that Degas was a great artist: it was nonetheless a remarkable experience to have it con- firmed again and again in a series of pic- tures as remarkable for their variety as for their breathtaking accomplishment. It is a pity this exhibition will not travel. It is worth a trip to New York to see it.
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