April 7, 2022 21Printed in large quarto format, in a
handsome three- volume boxed set,
Reff’s edition of The Letters of Edgar
Degas is the fruit of sixty years of sus-
tained engagement with the artist. A
professor emeritus in Columbia Uni-
versity’s Department of Art History
and Archaeology—where he started
teaching in 1957—Reff is also an au-
thority on Manet and Cézanne. He
published Degas’s thirty- eight note-
books in 1976, with a revised edition
appearing in 1985; coauthored the
Supplement to Lemoisne’s four- volume
catalogue raisonné in 1984; and since
1960 has contributed innumerable
articles and catalog essays on the art-
ist. Reff’s bilingual edition of Degas’s
correspondence demonstrates his ex-
traordinary tenacity in tracking down,
reviewing, and dating more than 1,200
letters. Like many of their literary con-
temporaries (and any well- educated
bourgeois of the period), the long-
lived Impressionists were energetic
letter writers. Pissarro’s published
correspondence comprises more than
2,000 letters; Monet’s more than 3,000;
Renoir’s, currently in preparation, will
likely include over 1,700.
Most impressive are Reff’s footnotes
to each entry, which distill informa-
tion from cadastral records, state and
municipal archives, and published ac-
counts that bear on the contents of
the letter in question. His third vol-
ume contains English translations of
all the letters; succinct—and wherever
possible, illustrated—biographies of
the 125 most frequently mentioned
correspondents; a map of Degas’s
Montmartre and L’Opéra, with ninety-
seven addresses, including those of his
homes and studios as well as those of
his closest associates (we can see that
it took Degas less than five minutes to
walk from his studio on the rue Victor-
Massé to the Halévys on rue de Douai);
a chronological listing of all the letters;
and indices spanning sixty pages. The
three volumes are a tour de force of
scholarship, and will become invalu-
able companions not only for students
and admirers of Degas, but also for
those interested in the Impressionists
generally and in the city of Paris in the
second half of the nineteenth century.
Among the Impressionists, Degas
has been the best served by the many
scholars, art historians, and catalog-
ers who have devoted themselves to his
art. Since the magnificent and compre-
hensive retrospective exhibition seen
in 1988–1989 at the Metropolitan Mu-
seum of Art in New York, the National
Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, and the
Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais in
Paris—with a catalog that remains the
standard reference on the artist^10 —there
have been exhibitions and publications
devoted to every aspect, period, and
genre of Degas’s work: his portraiture,
nudes, dancers, jockeys, and landscapes,
for example, as well as his sculpture,
monotypes, and photographs.
With its rigor and precision, Reff’s
edition of Degas’s letters brings insight
and new information to examples of
each of these. A receipt to Faure for
5,000 francs dated March 6, 1874, es-
tablishes conclusively that the Metro-
politan Museum of Art’s The Dance
Class, commissioned in late October orearly November 1873, in which Degas
flattered his patron by including in the
background a poster for Gioachino
Rossini’s Guillaume Tell (one of
Faure’s greatest roles), was completed
early in 1874. It was the first version of a
composition repeated with minor vari-
ations on a canvas that is today in the
Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Furthermore,
Reff establishes once and for all that it
was the Met’s picture that appeared in
the first Impressionist exhibition in Na-
dar’s studio in April 1874, where it was
listed as Examen de danse au théâtre,
belonging to “M. Faure.”
Similarly, in republishing Degas’s
letter of October 23, 1874, to Charles
William Deschamps, the manager of
the London branch of Durand- Ruel’s
gallery, Reff notes Degas’s reassurance
from the dealer’s enthusiasm for the re-
cent arrival of a painting that would be
exhibited in London the following year.
This was most likely Dancer Posing for
a Photograph (Dancer in Front of the
Window), which until now had reason-
ably enough been dated to 1875, since
it was shown in the spring of that year
at Deschamps’s New Bond Street Gal-
lery as Ballet Dancer Practising. De-
gas’s letter confirms that the painting
was completed by October 1874, and
Reff speculates that it reached London
too late to be included in the catalog
of Des champs’s current show, which
opened on November 16. By such
means does one arrive at refinements
in dating and chronology.
Reff’s edition of the correspondence
has been published under the auspices
of the Wildenstein Plattner Institute,
established in New York and Paris in
2016 to support the production of cat-
alogues raisonnés and the digitization
of archival sources, so one hopes that
an online edition of it might one day be
forthcoming. This would be the ideal
way in which to incorporate the rare
item that has escaped Reff’s notice or
to publish correspondence that might
one day reappear, such as Degas’s
letters to the actress Ellen André or
Cassatt. In the ranks of the former is a
receipt in the Morgan Library and Mu-
seum dated January 16, 1915. It records
the sale by Degas for 4,000 francs of
a small painting on Haviland ceramic
tile representing a singer at a café con-
cert to Pierre Cloix, an intermediary
for the Jewish art dealer Paul Rosen-
berg, who had recently opened glamor-
ous new quarters at 21, rue la Boétie,
and with whom Degas, unsurprisingly,
had no relations.^11 Cloix sold it to
Rosenberg on the same day for 4,400
francs, earning a modest commission
of 10 percent. Q(^10) Degas, 1834–1917, edited by Jean
Sutherland Boggs (Metropolitan Mu-
seum of Art/National Gallery of Can-
ada, 1988).
(^11) “Vendu à Monsieur Cloix une peinture
sur carreau d’Haviland représentant
une chanteuse de café concert,” Morgan
Library and Museum, MA 9076.30, gift
of Mrs. Alexandre P. Rosenberg, 2013
(unpublished). For the painting Mlle
Bécat aux Ambassadeurs (circa 1875–
1876), see Michael Shulman, Edgar
Degas, 1834–1917: The Digital Critical
Catalogue, MS- 2420; available at degas-
catalogue.com. Haviland and Co. was
a porcelain manufactory founded by
Charles Edward Haviland, for which, in
the late 1870s, Degas provided designs
for vases. Haviland’s personal collection
of modern French paintings included
Degas’s superb Jockeys Before the Race
(circa 1879). See Renoir Portraits: Im-
pressions of an Age, edited by Colin B.
Bailey (Yale University Press, 1997),
p. 206.
The devastating second collection
by Solmaz Sharif, author of Look,
a finalist for the National Book Award
I said what I meant
but I said it
in velvet. I said it in feathers.
And so one poet reminded me
Remember what you are to them.
Poodle, I said.
And remember what they are to you.
Meat.
—from “Patronage”
Irene Solá’s spellbinding novel
places one family’s tragedies against
the uncontainable life force of
the land itself.
“Sharif’s commanding voice reverberates throughout
this complex and confident collection.”
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“Sharif demonstrates remarkable talent in her ability to
so deftly portray the traumatizing balance required
to live in the West with deep roots in Iran.”
—Michael Ruzicka, Booklist, starred review
Translated from the Catalan by
Mara Faye Lethem
“The overlapping, multifaceted
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“Translated with great musicality and wit... rich
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GRAYWOLF PRESS
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