Volume 41, Number 6 · March 24, 1994
Degas Out of Doors
By John Updike
Degas Landscapes 21–April 3, 1994, and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, April 24–July 3, 1994
an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, January
Degas Landscapes
catalog of the exhibition by Richard Kendall
Yale University Press, 312 pp., $55.00
No matter how the wind shifts, Degas's stock is solid. For those whose conservative tastes favor representation, Degas was the most scrupulous draughtsman of the Impressionists—the slowest to cast off the spell of academic training, with its tedious but useful copying from museum masterpieces and 'the antique'; the drawing in even Degas's oldest, most furiously rapt pastels of nude bathers is deliciously correct. For those whose tastes ask of an artist a certain individual violence—a personal expressionism that creates rather than imitates nature—Degas presents a model restlessness and willingness to experiment. His formal manners belong to the nineteenth century, but his artistic ruthlessness and freedom to the twentieth. His eccentric perspectives, his truncated compositions, his increasingly daring juxtapositions of color make us reflect, in modern style, upon the operations of perception—or, more precisely, upon the synthetic tensions that occur when a vision in three dimensions is reduced to a two-dimensional colored surface.
Review, 2828 words
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