Degas at the Races. - Review - book review

JEAN SUTHERLAND BOGG et al.

novel Haven: Yale University Press, 1998 272 pp; 144 color ills., 149 b/w $50

The exhibition Degas at the Races ran from April to July 1998 at a single venue the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC It was not the first exhibition at any time devoted to Degas's racing images, since Wildenstein lay on such a show in 1968 on the other hand it was their first public museum showing. It comprised 128 works, including a replete representation of both the earliest and mature images and 19 plastic arts (mainly the Mellon collection of waxes promised to the gallery). It is prelud by dint of Degas's early copies of horses from past art, to which Boggs's true copy constantly refers, as if to imply that Degas is "really" still thinking of these when he does his later racing images. Embedded in this way of doing art history, however, is an ideological true copy wherein the wounds of modernization (if indeed they appear at all) are healed by dint of the subliminal operation of cultural memory. Bogg fleetingly leaves to horses embodying the "same passion for freedom with discipline" as Degas did (p 19) a revealing aside. Apart from its b eing logically nonsensical (a horse desiring to be bridled!), what the formulation really draws our attention to is the figure of (self-) command and humanistic responsibility found thus frequently in Degas interpretation. Degas is clearly 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.

single significant coup of the exhibition was the loan of the Mellon Collection show from the Steeplechase (L140) [1] his next to the first Salon acceptance, shown at the 1866 Salon and, since its acquisition by means of Paul Mellon in 1960, exhibited sole once in 1966 in a display of Mellon's be in possession of collection at the same venue as the near show. Boggs's main proposition about this picture, that it could be seen to signify the potential for the personal downfall of its mould Degas's feckless brother Achille, bears ample witness to her highly problematic methodology (the picture as meaning the human contented of the model used). at the same time she also calls it "something of an allegory" (p 58) about the lack of heroism or blame in the show which seems a gross misrepresentation of in what manner antiallegorical avant-garde practice generates meaningfulness. It is in its combining of enormous size, stripped late imagery, and a theme of meaningless accident that spectacle from the Steeplechase would have transgressed Salon norms (and it was accepted pre umably sole because of Barbizon sympathizers upon the jury). Recalling the picture to Francois Thi[acute{e}]bault-Sisson, Degas talked about having "perpetrated" this work, [2] which secures mistranslated by Boggs as "perpetuated," thus obscuring an extraordinary criminal analogy which has in like manner far passed without comment in the Degas literature.

Boggs's approach is devoid of the contextu-alizing impulse of the fresh social art history. To more [i]or[/i] less extent this is compensated for by means of Kimberly Jones's bolted-on essay recounting the history of horse racing and her extreme point piece chronological table. Using her chronology; for example, we can list an extraordinary sixty-two painted and sculpt equestrian controls (of which at least thirty-two are clearly identifiable as racing images from the titles) as being exhibited at the Paris Salon prior to the first Impressionist exhibition. This chronology mentions single oil and three sculptures upon the theme of horse racing as being exhibited alongside Degas's steeplechase painting at the 1866 Salon and, for the previous Salon, four oils and single bronze. The evidence of her essay upon racing history makes it clear that Degas's show from the Steeplechase was produc at the height of French racing succes exhibited by the winning by Gladiateur in 1865 of all three lock opener English races plus the Grand Prix de Paris. Since many Salo n racing images depict winners, individual needs to reconstruct this tillage of images in order to understand what it might signify for Degas, as Bogg notes belatedly in the volume to depict a loser in 1866

Boggs's art history is basically connoisseurail. She may be sensitive to the expressive qualities of images on the other hand she is particularly blind to the meaningfulness of role-based cultural behavior. She is advantageous at sorting out chronological followings of work and later repaintings. However, while she exhibits that Degas began depicting racing make submissives in 1861 and repainted The Gentlemen's Race: Before the Start, in the Mus[acute{e}]e d'Orsay, perhaps in the 1880 possibly adding then the date of 1862 noting further is made of this. Given that Manet is recorded as saying that "Degas was painting Semiramis when I was painting late Paris," [3] Degas's concern with the dating and artistic upgrading of his first major racing picture (its original state dating to a two of years earlier than Manet's) clearly embodied the competitive impulse within the functioning of vanguardism.