Volume 3, Number 7 · November 19, 1964
Impressions of Degas
By Francis Haskell
My Friend Degas
by Daniel Halévy, translated and edited, with notes by Mina Curtiss
Wesleyan, 127 pp., $6.00
The Unknown Degas and Renoir in the National Museum of Belgrade
by Denis Rouart
McGraw-Hill, 152 pp., $22.50
Two or three times a week Degas would leave his studio, ring our door well and sit down at table with us'—irresistible words which occur on the first page of Daniel Halévy's remine-scences of the artist. Halévy, though a man of the very highest gifts and achievements, was only sixteen when he began to keep the journal here transcribed and he did not have the overriding intellectual preoccupations which underlie Paul Valéry's memoirs of Degas. Though many of the same stories are naturally recorded by both men, in this case it is made absolutely clear that Degas has left his studio and is relaxing with close friends. This is a domestic portrait, as evocative as a Vuilard, in which Degas sometimes merges into the background of that happy family life which he appears to have deliberately denied to himself: 'it seems to me,' he had written when only twenty, 'that to be a serious artist today one must soak oneself in solitude.' He relentlessly adhered to this program, and yet he had a longing and deep capacity for friendship, as was recognized by all who were close to him. 'Bitter?,' he once protested to Daniel's father, Ludovic, 'but I am very happy. Everybody knows that.' 'Only those who know you personally,' came the reply. But we know him now only through such memoirs as these and a series of masterpieces which have appeared to be so enigmatic that every critic has held different views as to what his subjects meant to him. Bitter? There have been few to dissent.
Review, 1500 words
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