Degas and Impressionism: A Thorny Artist Makes for a Quirky Show

For Impressionism’s 150th anniversary, the Clark Art Institute probes an outsized artist’s cryptic impact.

T his year is the 150th anniversary of the first Impressionist exhibition. From mid April to mid May 1874, a new collective called the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, Printmakers, Etc. displayed art at the studio of the famous photographer Felix Nadar. That Nadar was also a pioneer in balloon aviation is no coincidence. The Impressionists had lofty, airy dreams of a new art, not just a new style. Not only the art of pastel colors and gauzy forms, Impressionism was a fresh take on realism and an embrace of the spontaneity of life. It was, like all contemporary art, about the now of its day. Immediacy, bourgeois life, weather, sunlight, color, and what the flâneur — or voyeur — spies are all Impressionist topics.

There is no more congenial or all-embracing place to ponder Impressionism than the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown in northwestern Massachusetts. Its founders, Sterling and Francine Clark, loved Impressionism idiosyncratically and, from the early 1920s to the mid ’50s, collected well and aplenty. Since the museum opened in 1955, its trustees, curators, and directors pushed the Clarks’ Impressionists at the margins, so the Clark today is the essential stop, in America at least, in the quest for an Impressionist nirvana. Last week, I visited the Clark’s new exhibition on Edgar Degas (1834–1917), who exhibited in seven of the eight Impressionist exhibitions between 1874 and 1886.

What we call Impressionism was, among much else, an assault on the Royal Academy and the official Paris Salon for their grip on the marketplace. Unapproved artists, outsiders because of style, subject, politics, or personal squabbles, found it hard to sell their work or even to get noticed unless officialdom raised its gates. The artists in the 1874 show hoped to bust the barricades, Marianne-style. April 15, 1874, the day the Impressionist show opened, can be called French art’s Bastille Day, Fourth of July, and — tipping my hat to the speech that felled the Berlin Wall — Tear Down This Wall Day. The Prussian invasion of France and siege of Paris in 1870 and 1871 and the collapse of East Germany in 1989 bookended more than a century of horrors during which Impressionism was a bright spot.

I’ll write about Impressionism at 150 once or twice more, but today I’ll visit the brambled topic of Degas as an Impressionist via the Clark’s Edgar Degas: Multi-Media Artist in the Age of Impressionism, a small show of undoubted Degas gems. Degas, audacious as an artist and a prickly shrub of a man, might very well have been the moving and shaking spirit behind Impressionism.

Degas is about 40 objects, almost all works on paper, divided in small sections of Degas monotypes, print portraits of his friends, his etchings of women before and after bathing, and Degas and the theater. The selection seems a tad arbitrary. Some objects were borrowed from other collections, and I’m not sure why the Clark excluded so many good things from its collection of about 80 works by Degas.

As far as I can tell, none of the 140 or so works by Degas exhibited in the Impressionist shows in which he participated are in Degas. Why not? It says it’s a multimedia exhibition, but there are no sculptures in the show. Why not? The Clark owns so much Degas sculpture, including the bronze Little Dancer Aged 14, possibly the museum’s best-known object. The wax version was in the 1881 Impressionist show. The bronze is on view, but it’s in a permanent-collection gallery with Renoirs, Monets, and Pissarros. Why?

It’s an impressionistic, free-form exhibition showing some delicious things. Degas is mostly known as a painter, but, like Picasso, Goya, Whistler, and Dürer, he was most relentlessly inventive when it came to paper, ink, and a press. He made hundreds of monotypes, a strange, hybrid medium where the artist inks an un-incised plate, either glass or metal, and then runs it through a printing press. The paper greedily drinks the ink, often most of it, making a single impression that looks like a blurry dream. It’s a cross between a painting and a print. A second impression, called a ghost print, is sometimes possible.

Shadows and light do the heavy lifting, with little that can be called linear. Moonrise, from around 1880, is in the exhibition. What’s Impressionist about this, or The Jockey from the early 1880s, or the bizarre Woman by a Fireplace from sometime in the 1880s? They dissolve form into a blurry whole that can convey motion or memory. Degas missed only one Impressionist salon but only because — very disputatious and rebellious artist that he was — he insisted that people participating in Impressionist shows couldn’t submit art to the official Paris Salon at the same time. He was the ultimate outsider. The Impressionists meant to bust convention, as Degas surely did.

Degas’s Leaving the Bath, a drypoint and aquatint from 1879 and 1880, is another revelation and could be an exhibition of its own, considering that Degas made 22 states, or versions, of this single composition. Degas displays six or seven, including the first and the last. It’s not that he was fickle. With each state, he fiddled with a line here and there and how he inked the plate, all to experiment. Aquatint is best understood not as an incised line but as tiny molecules that create a powdery surface when they’re sprinkled on a plate immersed in an acid bath. Goya was an aquatint pioneer and used it mostly for backgrounds, where variations in aquatint shades helped create depth. Degas is more inventive, using it to make abstract, oddball patterns.

Drypoint is a line made with a tool that pushes metal in the plate to the sides, creating a jagged, deep line that prints velvety, deep, and dark. I’m all for close looking and leaving the visitor to his own devices, but I think the exhibition needed to point us in the right direction in identifying the subtle changes, many obscure, that Degas made from version to version.

The exhibition displays two versions of Mary Cassatt at the Louvre: The Etruscan Gallery, from the end of the 1870s. I’m not sure why two are in the show, or why Degas’s canceled copper plate is there, but the very beautiful scene provokes me to return to the subject of Cassatt since I reviewed the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s exhibition of Cassatt’s working methods last week. Cassatt and Degas were friends, and she has to be considered his premiere acolyte. Degas pushed for her to be included in the fourth Impressionist salon, held in 1879. She skipped the seventh salon in 1882, the only one Degas missed.

Cassatt and Degas both came from the realist tradition in French avant-garde art. They collaborated on projects, and Cassatt was inspired by Degas, especially in her uninhibited, energetic handling of pastel. They were social equals, both from rich families. Cassatt promoted Degas’s work to American collectors, a boon for Degas since he offended so many collectors, dealers, critics, and artists in Paris. Degas was truly an obnoxious human being. An American, even an astute one, as was Cassatt, was less likely to fasten on how tiresome and insulting he could be. They were friends for 40 years. Of the two, Cassatt was the least inclined to abstraction. The wild things Degas did in, for instance, monotypes were not for her. Degas and babies? It’s a challenge to conceive of a pairing that would end in more tears.

Cassatt was by leagues the more limited artist. Like Berthe Morisot, she stuck to narrow topics driven by the conventional interests of women. Socially, neither would be forgiven for depicting prostitutes or horse races. But, in the case of Cassatt, landscapes, seascapes, and much of what a flâneur like, say, Gustave Caillebotte saw would not have been off-piste. She might not have plumbed these topics because she felt she couldn’t do them well.

Degas was, in a central way, the Impressionist who didn’t like Impressionism. He thought painting outdoors was a cheap, easy trick. The hard work in art is conveying memory by using the imagination. Working in nature gives trees, flowers, mountains, and water the upper hand. It’s for the lazy. Who knows what Degas’s sexuality was. I wrote a bit about this last year when I reviewed the Met’s Manet/Degas exhibition. He did lots of scenes of ballet dancers and prostitutes, but unlike, say, Renoir, the king of the Impressionist nude, Degas didn’t do nudes. Sitting next to Morisot at a party, he delivered what amounted to a speech on Solomon’s proverb about odious women who “disquiet the Earth.” If Degas was capable of lovemaking, it was with his art-making materials.

Entrance of the Masked Dancers, from 1879, is in the exhibition and worth the drive to Williamstown on its own. Mozart’s Don Giovanni, a staple of the Paris Opera and a Degas favorite, was sometimes augmented with dance numbers. Here, two dancers finished their scene while a new, masked cohort takes the stage. It’s a pastel, which makes for a gauzy blur that also suits muslin. We’re up close and personal with dancers as they exit breathless, adjusting their tutus and tights.

A top-hatted man lurks in the background. Much has been made of the man’s goals for the event, which might be more predatory than edifying, but who cares? I’m fixed on Degas’s luscious color. The dancer on the left sports more blues than the Caribbean, and the one on the right is no slouch in the pink-and-peach department. The masked dancers in back wear yellow, blue, and pink. The backdrop is an undefined sweep of what looks like tutti-frutti ice cream. If you can’t taste it, you ain’t human.

I love Degas’s lighting, too. The stage would have been lit by incandescent gas lamps creating a soft, gently pulsating glow. Electricity was around the corner, but Degas’s dancers are electric enough. Whether gaslit or electrified, Paris offered new raw material to chroniclers of everyday life. Far less was unseen and private. Behind-the-scenes views of bourgeois city life were among the arrows in the Impressionist quiver. That we see them in snippets explains odd Impressionist angles.

Impressionism has many moving parts. The first salon in 1874 was a rebellion against the status quo, the men in suits, and the P’s and Q’s class. For rebels, like Degas, rebellion was a character trait. Renoir was more mainstream. At one point, the Clark owned more than 40 Renoir paintings, but the museum’s sold some to buy art, so now there are 35 or so, still more than in any American museum other than the Barnes in Philadelphia. Renoir had a 50-year career, but the Clarks, as much as they loved his work, collected Renoirs, by and large, done between 1878 or so and 1882. Degas, Monet, Pissarro, and Renoir evolved over the years and, after the last Impressionist show in 1886, decided they had too little in common.

During that narrow window, Renoir painted in a gauzy style, depicted a range of subjects, and used the pretty palette that the Clarks liked the most. After 1882, when Renoir returned from a long visit to Italy, his painted figures became too sculptural.

Sterling Clark loved art about young women, clothed and unclothed, but Renoir’s women after Italy evoked the delights of cold, hard marble, not warm, pliant flesh. Blonde Bather, from 1881, is peak Renoir insofar as Sterling was concerned. Sleeping Girl, from 1880, is on the verge of predatory. Renoir’s Onions, from 1881, is believed to have been Sterling’s favorite among the 500 or so paintings he owned. It appeals to almost all the senses, all of them if this picture of onions and garlic triggers thoughts of the dinner gong.

The Clarks, untroubled by Degas’s contempt for outdoor painting, owned Monet landscapes and seascapes. A few years after both Clarks died, the museum bought Monet’s Rouen Cathedral, from around 1893. Sterling didn’t like abstraction and would have found the assault on materiality too much to bear. He liked his women fleshy but wanted them to look as if they were of the here and now. Though Episcopalian by class and faith, he wasn’t aroused by church façades. Port of Rouen, by Camille Pissarro, the dean of Impressionism, was purchased by the museum in 1989. A gritty, smelly harbor scene, it would not have topped Sterling’s dance card.

The Clarks purchased works by Degas starting with his atelier sale in 1919, two years after the artist died. At that point, Old Masters still drew Sterling’s attention and many piles of spare pennies. Old Masters, as a field, were what a man of Clark’s wealth and status collected. His purchase of part of an altarpiece by Piero della Francesca in 1913 — his first art acquisition — was a smash choice. In 2024, there are still only two or three Pieros in the United States. By the late 1910s, though, Sterling was grumbling over the cost of Old Masters. He’d just married Francine, too. She was French. By that time, Sterling was dividing his time between Paris and New York, was a committed Francophile, and was also nudged by his new wife to look at Impressionism.

While Sterling hated Picasso and didn’t respond positively to Cézanne and Gauguin, Degas’s craftsmanship appealed to him. Of all the Impressionists, Degas and Renoir were most bound by classical standards of proportion, harmony, and clarity. Francine had been an actress at the Comédie-Française, and both she and Sterling were fond of ballet. That Degas depicted horses was also part of the draw. Sterling was a renowned horse breeder.

There are few museums more comfortable for contemplating art than the Clark. Sterling and Francine conceived of the original 1955 gallery building as a homey place, and, indeed, it is. It was built on the footprint of a typically spacious Berkshires country home, so it has a domestic scale. Until Sterling died, the Clarks lived in an apartment in the museum. Almost all of the Clark’s collection is human-size. Giant art is rare. Impressionism is art for all seasons, but summer is tourist time, bringing to the Clark a vast population of irritants. Most mean well, and the tourists from New Jersey, well, they can’t help it. During the rest of the year, the Clark’s few visitors have the place to themselves. Yes, Impressionist nirvana is a good way to describe this unique place.