18 The New York ReviewA Compulsive Perfectionist
Colin B. BaileyThe Letters of Edgar Degas
bilingual edition edited and
annotated by Theodore Reff.
Wildenstein Plattner Institute,
3 volumes, 1,461 pp., $200.
(distributed by Pennsylvania
State University Press)Why do you say that Degas has
trouble getting a hard- on? Degas
lives like a little notary and doesn’t
like women, knowing that if he
liked them and fucked them a lot
he would become cerebrally ill
and hopeless at painting. Degas’s
painting is virile and impersonal
precisely because he has resigned
himself to being personally no
more than a little notary, with a
horror of riotous living.Vincent van Gogh’s crude speculations,
written to Émile Bernard from Arles
in August 1888, would have appalled
the intensely private fifty- four- year- old
Edgar Degas, who had recently started
selling his work through Vincent’s
brother, Theo, a director at Boussod,
Valadon & Cie. (Degas’s own collec-
tion, formed during the 1890s, would
include two glorious still lifes and an
early drawing by Vincent.) The pruri-
ent reader will look in vain among the
1,240 letters transcribed, dated, an-
notated, and translated in Theodore
Reff’s monumental edition of Degas’s
correspondence for revelations about
his sexuality and erotic life, although
there is a businesslike letter to the Ital-
ian painter Giovanni Boldini—with
whom he was about to travel to Spain—
written from Pau, in southwestern
France, on September 3, 1889, in which
he instructs Boldini to buy condoms
for them both from Milan, a Parisian
establishment that Degas clearly knew
well: “Buy an ample number. There
might be seductions in Andalusia, first
of all for you, and even for me.”^1
Daniel Halévy, the younger son of
Degas’s good friends the librettist and
member of the Académie française
Ludovic Halévy and Louise Bre guet,
heiress to a clockmaking fortune,
noted in his memoir, Degas parle, that
his family, and their friends and asso-
ciates, were part of the “liberal bour-
geoisie, who joined material comfort
and a simple way of life to the joys of
culture and a love of music.” Degas,
who dined weekly with the Halévys for
almost fifteen years, shared these val-
ues, although in his case one hesitates
to use the term “liberal,” since his in-
creasing conservatism and unbridled
anti- Semitism cast a shadow over his
final decades. Not given to introspec-
tion or confession; rarely expounding
upon the theory of his art or his ambi-
tions as a modernist (a term he would
have despised, given his veneration of
the old masters); a perfectionist and to
some degree a compulsive (he attended
thirty- seven performances of the 1884
opera Sigurd, by the now- forgotten
Ernest Reyer)—Degas reveals himself
intermittently in his voluminous corre-
spondence, in instances of unexpected
self- awareness and candor.But as Reff also points out, there are
lacunae and surprising absences: only
a handful of letters from the 1850s and
1860s, few surviving letters to Degas’s
family or fellow Impressionists, and a
preponderance of transactional items,
in the form of letter and telegram cards
requesting money or giving financial
instructions to his dealer, Paul Durand-
Ruel. Had Degas been willing to install
a telephone, introduced in France in
1878, one sixth of the published cor-
respondence might not have existed.
When his friend the illustrator and
painter Jean- Louis Forain arranged
for him to witness a phone call, he re-
mained unimpressed: “So that’s the
telephone!... They ring, and you run.”
Degas was an advocate for a re-
formed state- sponsored annual Salon
to which artists might contribute their
work without the oversight of an offi-
cial jury, a founding member of the
Impressionist movement, and a major
force behind six of the eight Impres-
sionist exhibitions held between 1874
and 1886. So it comes as something of
a shock that he was so dismissive of
plein air painting and of working out-
doors in general, central tenets of the
New Painting in the 1870s. The dealer
Ambroise Vollard recalled him saying,
“If I were the government I would have
a special brigade of gendarmes to keep
an eye on artists who paint landscapes
from nature. Oh, I don’t mean to kill
anyone: just a little dose of bird- shot
now and then as a warning.” Staying
with the Halévys at their country housein Étretat in July 1882, he quipped
to the young painter Jacques- Émile
Blanche, “The weather is beautiful, but
more Monet than my eyes can stand.”In the early 1870s, when he made a
rare effort to articulate his aesthetic
principles, Degas championed natural-
ism and realism, terms he used inter-
changeably. The word “Impressionist”
never passed his lips; he preferred the
less provocative epithet “indépendant,”
which he ensured was used in the ti-
tles of the fourth and seventh Impres-
sionist exhibitions in 1879 and 1882.
To his great friend Henri Rouart, the
industrialist and early collector of the
Impressionists, Degas wrote from New
Orleans in December 1872, “I dream of
creating something well made, a well-
ordered whole (in the style of Poussin)
and like Corot in old age.” In February
1873, while still in America, Degas ad-
vised the painter James Tissot:Remember the art of the Lenain
brothers and the French Middle
Ages. Our race will produce some-
thing simple and bold. The nat-
uralist movement will draw like
the great schools, and then will its
strength be recognized.Back in Paris in the spring of 1874,
he urged Tissot—without success—to
participate in the first Impressionist
exhibition, which opened on April 15:
“The realist movement no longer needsto struggle against the others. It is, it
exists, it needs to be seen on its own
terms. There has to be a realist Salon.”
Advocating for a prescribed repertory
of subjects to which he would return
throughout a fifty- year career—ballet
dancers rehearsing and performing,
musicians in the opera pit, jockeys pre-
paring for a race, laundresses, shop
assistants, women taking their baths—
Degas had confided in November 1872
to the Danish artist Lorenz Frølich,
“Art does not expand, it condenses....
Only a very long stay would give you
the habits of a race, that is to say, its
charm.” This is consistent with an ob-
servation he made over a decade later
to his closest companion of the time, the
sculptor Paul- Albert Bartholomé: “You
have to redo the same subject ten times,
a hundred times. Nothing in art should
appear accidental, not even movement.”
Degas’s resistance to plein air paint-
ing was also due to chronic problems
with his sight, his fear of blindness, and
recurring anxiety about his vision. (He
suffered from photophobia and even-
tually saw only out of his left eye.)^2
Working outdoors by the Seine in the
summer of 1871, Degas experienced
severe eyestrain. He told Tissot that
discomfort in his eyes “first happened
on the river bank in Chatou under the
blazing sun, while making a watercolor;
it cost me three weeks of being unable
to read, work, or go outside much, and
made me tremble with fear that I would
remain this way.” While visiting his
brother René’s family in New Orleans in
the winter of 1872–1873, he wrote to Tis-
sot, “There are so many beautiful things
I could have made and rapidly, were the
bright sunlight not so unbearable to me.”
Blindness and sight are powerful
themes in Degas’s letters, and his pre-
occupation with conserving his vision
for his art, against the demands of read-
ing and writing, is a constant refrain.
(In the early 1890s he also asserted, to
the contrary, that “differences in vision
are of no importance. One sees as one
wishes to see and it is this falseness that
constitutes art.”) Cold weather, the
damp, and fog were bad for his eyes;
by the early 1880s he complained that
he needed a magnifying glass to read.
He insisted that his correspondents
write more legibly and in January 1892
ordered his sister Thérèse “to adopt
a new manner of writing, forming
round letters with one of those pens
cut with a square tip, using very black
ink, not putting tails on your letters,
and spacing the words far apart.” His
housekeeper, Zoé Closier, a former
schoolteacher, read aloud to him ev-
erything that did not need to be kept
in confidence, and beginning in 1892,
Degas’s lunches were accompanied
by Zoé reading the latest vitriol from
Édouard Drumont’s La Libre Parole, a
virulent anti- Semitic daily.
Degas’s letters of the 1870s reveal
him to be a determined adversary of
the official art establishment, notably
its control of the annual Salon with
its prizes, awards, and acquisitions.
He had large ambitions for his art andEdgar Degas: Degas and Évariste de Valernes, 1865Musée d’Orsay, Paris/Alamy(^1) Translations from the letters follow
those provided in Reff’s volumes but
are occasionally my own.
(^2) See the magisterial article by Richard
Kendall, “Degas and the Contingency
of Vision,” The Burlington Magazine,
Vol. 130, No. 1,020 (March 1988).
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