Volume 35, Number 16 · October 27, 1988
The Sad Degas
By Murray Kempton
Degas (September 27, 1988–January 8, 1989)
An exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
The Metropolitan's great Edgar Degas retrospective is one of those unsettling experiences that enrich the soul by saddening the heart. Here are nearly four hundred paintings, drawings, bronzes, and even photographs, and there is not a smile among them if we discount the grisly leers of the prostitutes. Much of Degas's mystery comes to abide in a sustained power to charm without ever stooping to seduce us. He may well have been the last of the great narrative painters, and his narratives are almost always enigmas. Who is this woman who weeps in a corner of the hotel chamber, and who is this man who stands stiff and silent with his back against the door as far from her as he can get without fleeing outright, and what fresh trespass or what old crime had put them together and set them so far apart in the same narrow room?
Review, 701 words
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