Peter Schjeldahl’s review in the magazine this week of “Degas and the Nude,” a show at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, reveals the artist to have been a cold, sardonic, embittered man as well as a bigot: “The Dreyfus affair smoked him out as an anti-Semite, and he once fired a model when he learned that she was Protestant.” This confirms the impression that I always had from his paintings, in which the ballet dancers never seemed illuminated by their efforts, the washerwomen never ennobled by their toil—and his very obsession with the broad, dusty floors of stages suggested the colorful spectacle’s inescapable grubbiness. This isn’t a matter of anti-Semitism or bigotry per se, but of a bilious repudiation of the world as it runs, or, in a word, modernity. And there’s one painting, on permanent view in my favorite recondite corner of the Metropolitan Museum, that, for me, sums up Degas’s dyspeptic rejectionism. It’s a landscape of sorts, a genre he didn’t practice much; it’s in the Robert Lehman Collection, a treasure chest in the very back of the main building which brings together a small but exquisite range of masterworks from the modern millennium—including a couple of magnificent Rembrandts—and is crowned by a finely calibrated brace of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works.
The landscape, “View of Saint-Valéry-sur-Somme,” is from 1896-98—in the midst of the Dreyfus affair—and its palette is actually darker and more drab than in the online reproduction. The alleys, backyards, and jumbled rooflines of the town seem as constricting as a prison; the swaths of greenery are bland and clotted. It’s filled with the results of much labor but no humanity; and the horizon beyond the town is empty. It isn’t just a painting of no future but also of no present; it presents the northern seaside town as a grim and cramped wasteland of respectable and reasonable industriousness. It’s the most sour and anti-modern painting I’ve ever seen; I’ve revisited it often (I’ve lived, for almost thirty years, within walking distance of the Met) and, long before having read anything about Degas (and Peter’s article, regarding Degas’s techniques, influences, and obsessions, is revelatory), I felt as if I knew what kind of person he was.
In France, at the time of this painting, the Lumière brothers and Georges Méliès, among others, were launching the new art: the cinema. We have Degas’s paintings behind the scenes at the ballet; too bad he didn’t go behind the scenes at the primordial movie studios.
“View of Saint-Valéry-sur-Somme,” the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Robert Lehman Collection.
