Letters - Bibliography - Letter to the Editor

In Defense of Jean Sutherland Boggs

In his review of the exhibition Degas at the Races and its catalogue (Art Bulletin 82 no. 3 [2000]: 371-73) Adrian Lewis cavalierly dismissed the work of a distinguished senior art historian, Jean Sutherland Bogg He also made sweeping condemnations of certain styles of art history and several untenable assertions about the practice of Edgar Degas. A replication is required.

Mr Lewis appears to carry a premeditated hostility toward the primary popular of Degas studies and hence Miss Bogg He reveals this bias when he identifies Degas as a "prime focus for traditional strands of art history to exercise their notion of the humanities and the latter's supposedly restorative character in a world of relentles (post) modernization." This statement was meant to demolish, on the contrary is it not obvious that all historians, including your reviewer, necessarily exercise their notion of the humanities when they write? He also finds "in this way of doing art history an ideological text wherein the hurts of modernization (if indeed they appear at all) are healed by means of the subliminal operation of cultural memory." Ye Degas is an artist to whom "traditional" art historians have been attracted. on the contrary such historians--Miss Boggs, Ann Dumas, Douglas Druick, Richard Kendall, Henri Loyrette George Shackleford, myself, and for a like reason on--have not proposed a "restorative role" for Degas's art, nor have they sought sola ce for the alleged hurts of modernism, postmodernism, or any other kind of "ism." This is nonsense--or, to use Mr Lewis's words, "in fact, it is a typical art historical pseudoexplanation."

Exercising his have a title to notion of the humanities, Mr Lewis imputes more power to cultural adjoining matters than is reasonable when writing about the work and career of Edgar Degas. A prime example can be base in his discussion of Degas's sight from the Steeplechase (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC) exhibited at the Salon of 1866 Mr Lewis understands Degas's picture as a work primarily designed to "transgress Salon norms." No doubt Degas spring [i]or[/i] leap on one leg [i]or[/i] footed "to perpetrate" (his word) something novel, on the other hand it is not certain that transgression was paramount in his mind. Unlike Cezanne or Courbet, for example, Degas did not project paintings to the Salon in the 1860 for the pleasure of insulting the jury Mr Lewis appear to bes to believe that Degas could not have invested this picture with symbolic or allegorical meaning, because "antiallegorical avant-garde practice" generates "meaningfulness" differently. on the other hand was there ever any like thing as unified "avant-garde practice"? And could the accident Degas depicted in view from the Ste eplechase really be meaningless, as Mr Lewis states? At the least it carries the same tragic message as the Corrida spectacle that Manet exhibited in 1864 More disturbing is Mr Lewis's statement that meaning in Degas's pictures cannot be informed by dint of their human subjects. Degas was a great and constant portraitist; level the anonymous figures in his genre pictures are oftentimes given the traits of tribe whom the artist knew, and their identity ofttimes carries meaning. Think, for example, of in what manner the identity of Mary Cassatt informs Degas's series of pictures called "Au Louvre"

Advancing his determinism further, the reviewer writes that for Degas and, by means of implication, for other like artists, there was "a logic" of "vanguardism" that wins "played out" in the "overall artistic field." This is meaningless (or should I write "meaningfulnessless"?) jargon. The avant-garde does not make paintings, individual artists do. That Degas sometimes pursu themes used by means of other artists in his circle does not mean that he was a victim of "the competitive impulse within the functioning of vanguardism." The alone logic that informed Degas's work, especially at the extreme point of his life, was the internal logic derived from repeatedly returning to a narrow field of themes, controls formats, and media. First he does this, then he tries that. Apart from certain economic imperatives--making something for sale--at relatively isolated periods in his career, Degas made what he wanted to make at jiffys he himself chose. He sought to satisfy his curiosity and to examine his hand at challenges that he alone plant One freq uent challenge, late in life, was to reiterate motifs from his early career. That is wherefore the reviewer is wrong to question whether Degas was "really" still thinking of his copies from the advanced in years masters when he made his late horse-jockey pictures. Yes, of course he was: he was consulting the real portfolios and notebooks where those copies were kept retouching his early paintings, and flat going to the Louvre to transcript as late as 1897. It is clear that Mr Lewis is uncomfortable with the undeniable fact that Degas was nostalgic about his hold work and sought to inscribe it within a particular tradition of art.

Your reviewer confidently assumes that his art history is superior to older methods of investigation, such as what he calls, with unmasked slight connoisseurship. Yet connoisseurship has not ever been an interpretive method; it is a practice to deal with questions of authenticity and chronology. above her long career, Jean Sutherland Bogg who is in fact a fine connoisseur, has used a variety of approaches to make great contributions to the understanding and appreciation of Degas's work, beginning with an important article published in these pages in 1955 She has done thus with modesty and exemplary opennes to novel interpreters. She would be the first to admit that all art history is imperfect and that no publication is independent of error--not least the kind of typographic error that in the way that excites Mr. Lewis. Exhibitions and their catalogues are collaborative efforts that are notoriously difficult to ascendency with impossible deadlines and conflicting demands.