“Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty,” is wonderful but oddly finicky, as the Museum of Modern Art’s first Degas show, ever. It makes a big deal of an uncommon printmaking medium: monotype, created by working in ink on a hard surface and then pressing paper against it. The one-off results are unusual, to say the least—going against the common-sense notion that a print is an image multiplied. This and the unfamiliarity of most of the works—some hundred and twenty monotypes, from museums and collections worldwide, augmented with more conventional pictures—make the show special, in both the good and the pejorative senses. Magnifying glasses are provided to let us feel like hotshot connoisseurs, bending in to delectate in the nuances. The occasion might rankle without its payoff of a final room of first-rate paintings, pastels, and drawings: Degas hitting on all cylinders.
On its own limited terms, the show does yield useful insight into Degas’s modernizing transition from careful to spontaneous style, starting in the eighteen-seventies. It underlines the truth that his genius was essentially graphic, on a historical arc of linear sorcery from Ingres to Picasso. You sense his delight, in “dark field” monotypes, at the effects enabled by attacking spreads of wet ink with incising tools, rags, and his hands (see his fingerprints). Shapes and atmospheres loom in whites and textured grays from Stygian blackness: sculpted light, with a muscular feel. Those works, circa 1876-85, from Degas’s major foray into the technique, are his purest monotypes, and by far the most exciting. Elsewhere, he tended to use the medium as a ground for pictures completed in opaque watercolors or pastels. Innovative, perhaps, but uninspiring are monotypes, in oil paints, of landscapes. Those subjects don’t much engage Degas, who wasn’t an outdoors kind of guy.
He liked to watch women. For a viewer, that characteristic—clawing at present-day sensitivities—may well interfere with aesthetic detachment, as the show unfolds. There are women ironing, bathing (lots of bathing; also towelling off), performing in cafés, and, of course, dancing. Almost none of them evince a sense of being observed by the artist. In seventeen sensational brothel scenes, most of them from 1877-79, they stand, sit, or loll around availably naked and often frumpily at ease. One squats over a bidet. Another idly scratches one of her buttocks. Their milieu may seem a far cry from the candied glamour of ballet, but the two settings share the fact of women displaying themselves. Degas’s preoccupation along this line takes nothing away from the soaring quality of his works, but it helps to explain their intensity. Facing up to it, the show’s superb curator, Jodi Hauptman, includes in a wall text the forthright opinion of the great decadent writer J. K. Huysmans that Degas regarded women with “an attentive cruelty, a patient hatred.” That rings true. Certainly, there’s scant desire. Degas gives little sign of wanting women, but only of liking to subject them to his very particular, somewhat creepy gaze. ♦
