An academic approach
John McEwen
Inflation breeds academicism; that, at least, is the most obvious lesson of the visual art offerings at Edinburgh this season, notably in the form of 'Degas 1879' (Scottish National Gallery till 30 September) and the sculptures of Wilhelm Lehmbruck (lately at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and forthcoming at the Bank of Ireland, Dublin, 5 October —2 November; National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, 8 December —3 February; Mappin Art Gallery, Sheffield, 9 February — 6 March). Costs of insurance and transport, fear of strikes and vandalism, now make any exhibition difficult to realise and encourage the showing of artists whose work is close at hand or, as in the case of Lehmbruck, relatively unknown.
The apologia which serves as Professor Ronald Pickvance's introduction to 'Degas 1879' exactly catches the mood of our tight-budgeted times. Let us hope that one day soon it will read nostalgically. The exhibition, it explains, was first conceived of as a centenary reassembly of the work Degas exhibited and made in 1879, apparently a crucial year in his artistic life. Economically the idea made sound sense because three of the most important pictures Degas showed at the Fourth Impressionist Exhibition that year have subsequently come to permanent rest in British public collections, one of them the Scottish National Gallery itself (no insurance or transportation problems there; one can just imagine the approving nods at the first committee meeting). Furthermore, all three of these masterpieces have surviving pre paratory studies, some of them dated — rare instances of specific documentation in Degas's oeuvre.
But, alas, even though they are for the most part cheaply transportable drawings on paper, many proved unobtainable. And worse was to come. Degas listed seven dance paintings in the 1879 catalogue. Pickvance was unable to get one of them. Instead paintings relating to the theme but of an earlier date were brought from Glasgow and London, two pictures of a later date from America. Papering the cracks of this compromise are an assembly of thematic working drawings but, again the rueful admission, not all. No composition was available showing a bench or a stage-flat, the two 'fixtures' most characteristic of Degas's 1879 dance works. And so it goes on. Good news invariably proceeded by bad bravely presented as better, The two most famous female sitters of 1879 — Mary Cassatt and a Mme Dietz-Monnin — are underpresented; to compensate there are some milliners, laundresses and, spectacularly, the famous `L'Absinthe' from the Louvre. There are no fans — there were five of these idiosyneracies in the 1879 exhibition — but plenty of monotypes.
!Degas 1879' is therefore hardly up to trade description standards of accuracy. It would have been better to call it, more ambiguously, 'Degas '79': quite apart from its revelation of current economic preconditions, the end-result is a good example of the closely documented, scientific factuality of art studies today — method and information in this particular case owing most to the researches of Professor Theodore Reff, who recently catalogued Degas's notebooks in two handsome OUP volumes. It is an archeological approach. For instance, Reff has sifted the elements of Degas's style so diligently that he has even discovered that one of the master's depictions of a horse at Longchamp, apparently drawn on the spot, turns out to be nothing more than a skilful reversal in pose of one of Napoleon III's army horses from Meisonnier's 'Battle of Solferino'.
Those who feel such discoveries are all a bit too reminiscent of Dr Strabismus or the Burlington should, in the case of Degas, beware. There never has been an artist more committed to the study of his forerunners, more profoundly academic in approach than he was. A fact he gloried in. As he wrote to George Moore: 'No art was less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and study of the great masters; of inspiration, spontaneity, temperament, I know nothing.' And no exhibition could be truer to or more revealing of this unemotional attitude than 'Degas 1879', presented, appropriately, in the rigorously unappealing setting of the gallery's new subterranean extension, It shows that, though Degas often worked from the life in his preparatory sketches, his finished pieces are invariably a composite of source material, As documentations or impressions of certain places at certain times most of his pictures are valueless. His brothels, dance groupings, racecourses are almost all fictions. His dancers do steps, his jockeys sport colours that never existed. He disdains prima ballerinas or winners. All is anonymous — the class, the *start — everything subordinate to his imagination. And yet the incidental nature of so many of his subjects, their freshness —no one previously had thought laundresses at work, dancers rehearsing, jockeys awaiting the off, worthy of a picture — finds its exact counterpart in the apparent spontaneity of his art, climaxing as it does (though not here) in the astonishingly animated sculpture of his blindness. No artist demonstrates clearer than Degas that art is not documentation, technical freedom not Dionysiac selfexpression. Despite its self-confessed shortcomings, it is difficult to imagine an exhibition conveying these sobering truths more indubitably.
German sculptor of the early modern period. Born in 1881 he killed himself in 1919, yet another victim of the war. His increasingly angst-ridden, elongated figures had few immediate antecedents, but have become the clichés of traditionally trained figurative sculptors trying to symbolise 20th century despair, while keeping one eye on the avant garde. It is difficult as a result to see Lehmbruck plain. Nevertheless, it is not hard to understand Moore's longstanding interest in his work or to appreciate that Giacommetti probably came closest to fulfilling the despairing man's dreams.
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