THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, October 2, 1996 TAG: 9610020027
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Larry Maddry
LENGTH: 83 lines
THE GOOD NEWS is that Edgar Degas' ``Dancer With Bouquets'' - a centerpiece of the Chrysler Museum's Skylight Impressionist Gallery - is receiving greater national attention than has ever gone to a work in the museum's collection.
The bad news is that ``Dancer With Bouquets'' didn't get such acclaim until it left Norfolk to be part of an exhibition elsewhere.
The painting is on loan to the Art Institute of Chicago and will be there until next year.
The masterpiece, an oil painting of an aging prima ballerina taking her bows after a performance, is the largest work - 71-by-60 inches - by the reclusive Frenchman to be exhibited in ``Degas: Beyond Impressionism.'' The exhibit is now drawing huge crowds at the Chicago museum, and ``Dancer With Bouquets'' is on the cover of Smithsonian magazine.
The Chicago exhibition, which came to the United States after being shown at London's National Gallery, focuses on the period from 1890, when the artist was 56, to his death in 1917. It's believed to be the first to focus on the artist's later years.
``Dancer With Bouquets'' was a natural for the exhibition. Jefferson Harrison, the Chrysler's curator of European art, says the work loaned by the Chrysler was done between 1895 and 1900.
``In the painting, a prima ballerina takes a bow at the end of a performance: At her feet are bouquets of flowers tossed by an adoring audience,'' Harrison writes. ``The footlights, which fill the scene with a magical, if rather harsh, incandescence, transform the gauzy layers of her gown into a smoldering, violet-gray cloud.''
Degas' paintings were rarely, if ever, done on such a grand scale in his later years. The painting is vibrant with glorious color. But the ballerina has an almost sinister cast, her left hand forming what appears to be a serpent's mouth.
His subject in this instance nearly matches Degas' description of his art. He once said:
``A painting requires as much fraudulence, trickery and deception as the perpetration of a crime.''
In ``Dancer With Bouquets,'' Degas' subject is faintly suggestive of Lady MacBeth - albeit in the garb and pose of a ballerina.
The painting was not exhibited during the artist's lifetime but remained in his studio as a model for other works.
Being an amateur photographer, Degas' trick - make that genius - was to give his painted figures the quality of unstudied but instantaneous movement.
Harrison calls our attention to the odd angle of the viewer's vantage point. ``The tricks it plays with perspective and the dancer's pose are typical of Degas' later, more abstracted compositions,''he says.
Degas' talent for appearing spontaneous was deceptive. ``No art was ever less spontaneous than mine,'' he once said. ``What I do is the result of reflection and study of the great masters; of inspiration, spontaneity, temperament. . . . I know nothing.''
Known today, as in his lifetime, as a painter of the dance, Degas, like Manet, was from an upper middle-class background. Although involved in the organization of the first exhibition of Impressionistic painting, in 1874, he did not regard himself as an Impressionist.
A shy man with an acid wit, Degas was fanatical about his privacy - treating the uninvited to his studio with rudeness.
British painter Walter Sickert defended Degas' momentary lapses of courtesy.
``If the greatest painter of the age, who happens not to keep a footman, may not, in broad daylight, say that he is occupied, when, in God's name, is it proposed he should paint?'' Sickert asked.
Critics have tended to dismiss the last third of Degas' life. And he seemed to do the same. After age 50, he reflected on his celibacy and his failing eyesight. Seemingly unsure of his accomplishment, he wrote to a friend:
``I have lost the thread of things. . . . I piled up my plans in a cupboard for which I always had the key. And now I've lost the key.''
British art historian Richard Kendall, guest curator and author of the exhibit's catalog, says historians have been wrong to dismiss the latter third of Degas' life.
``The late work of Degas is just as powerful as what he did before,'' Kendall says. ``In terms of his influence on 20th century art, it was even more important.''
The exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago confirms that observation. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo by the Chrysler Museum of Art
"Dancer with Bouquets" by Edgar Degas is on loan from the Chrysler
Museum to Art Institute of Chicago for an exhibit. by CNB