Edgar Degas, Two Dancers on the Stage 1874. The Samuel Courtauld Trust, Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery, London.
Richard Moss left his Absinthe at home, side-stepped a ballerina and hopped on a train to take in the latest major show at Tate Britain.
The lead show for the autumn at Tate Britain follows the gallery's summer blockbusting show, Turner, Whistler, Monet, with another triumvirate of major nineteenth century painters; Edgar Degas, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Walter Sickert. For the gallery at Millbank at least - good things seem to come in threes.
Degas, Sickert and Toulouse-Lautrec; London and Paris 1870 – 1910 is however more than an examination of three artists – it’s also about two cities and the influence they exerted on each other. The confluence of French and British art that resulted makes for a fascinating tour of art at the end of the nineteenth century.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, The Clowness Cha-U-Kao 1895. Musée d’Orsay, Paris© photo RMN - H. Lewandowski.
As Richard Thompson, who co-curated the exhibition with Anna Geutzner Robins, says: “Its about Fraternity, Filth and Flash of the fin de siecle…that’s what you get in this show.”
Paintings by other prominent painters such as Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard and James Whistler and lesser-known figures like James Tissot, Henri Fantin-Latour, William Rothenstein and Charles Conder are included to illustrate the Franco-British make up of avante garde art at the time. It’s a mix that allows for some surprisingly complex and striking comparisons, dozens of captivating paintings and some interesting stories.
This is the Paris not only of the Folies Bergere and Moulin Rouge but of the dark realism of novelist Emile Zola. Equally it is the London of Wilde, Whistler and Jack the Ripper, so the art on show reflects the high life, the dandyism and the decadence of the period whilst also revealing the dark underbelly of late Victorian life.
Walter Richard Sickert, The P.S. Wings in the O.P Mirror 1889. Musée de Rouen © The Estate of Walter R Sickert. All rights reserved, DACS 2005.
The exhibition begins by introducing its central figure, Degas and how he influenced Sickert and other English artists.
Off-centre composition, pioneered by Degas in paintings like the ballet series or his opera paintings, are transposed to the late Victorian streets of London. Scenes here by the likes of Tissot (actually a French ex-pat), Giusseppe de Nittis, George Clausen and Sydney Starr offer a sometimes grimy and peculiarly English take on late French Impressionism.
But it’s the unusual angles and viewpoints of the master that dominate in this opening room of hustle and bustle. The three Degas 'ballet pictures' show how it should be done – figures are cut in half by frames whilst disembodied legs float down a spiral staircase. The palpable sense of movement and grace is such that it threatens to eclipse the art that surrounds it.
The 1880s also saw the unveiling of Degas’ Jockeys Before The Start of the Race, exhibited here for the first time since it was exhibited in London together with works by younger British painters of the period.
Giuseppe de Nittis, Piccadilly 1875. Private collection.
Together with The Ballet from Robert le Diable, it again brings home the way Degas was beginning to revolutionise art with his unusual angles and crops – little wonder that Sickert was in thrall to the French painter.
It’s a given that Degas influenced Sickert but this exibition sets up further dialogues; we are invited to consider whether Whistler’s formal portrait, Miss Alexander, influenced Degas’ bronze sculpture of a little dancer of 14 years (exhibited at the impressionist exhibition of 1881 in its wax version).
In Room Three a Sickert is placed next to a Lautrec and though it seems apparent that Sickert’s vision of the theatre was much more prosaic, (perhaps that’s down to the smog of old London and the nature of London theatre) if we follow the curator's train of thought we are left wondering: just who was influencing who?
Edgar Degas, The Ballet from Robert le Diable 1876. V&A.
Whatever the art's relative merits, the exhibition gives an impression of a healthy trade in ideas - the channel ferries of the fin de siecle presumably enjoyed brisk business ferrying bearded bohemians back and forth during this cross-channel entente cordiale.
We learn that Lautrec was a good friend of Oscar Wilde and supported him at his trial in London. Surprisingly for one often considered as the most quintessentially ‘French’ of French artists, Lautrec had a sizeable reputation in London - albeit as a graphic artist.
Room Three actually focuses on the 1990s - the 'naughty nineties' as Richard Thompson has it, and here the infectious imagery of popular entertainment and showgirls abounds, which means it really belongs to Lautrec.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec 1864-1901, La Troupe de Mademoiselle Eglantine 1896. V&A.
Here are Lautrec's great posters and images of dancers and music hall performers – both British and French – and a selection of fine theatrical portraits. Many of them were last shown in the largest one man show of his lifetime – held not in Paris but in a London Gallery in Regent Street 1898.
This central section of the exhibition also gently reminds us that British artists were as adept as their French counterparts when experimenting with colour and technique. Charles Conder, William Rothenstein and William Warrenner all went to Paris and, it seems, made an impact.
The Brit-pack evidently enjoyed the French capital in the early years of the 1890s. Conder, (when he wasn’t frequenting the Moulin Rouge) and Rothenstein had a two-man show in Paris, which was very well received by the French.
Walter Richard Sickert 1860-1942, The Gallery at the Old Bedford circa 1895. Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.
Conder's depictions of the Moulin Rouge show an artist fully conversant with the prevailing style of impressionism, whilst Arthur Melville’s work of this period is remarkable in its degree of abstraction and use of colour.
Watch out for Rothenstein's portrait of Conder, which crops up later in a remarkable sequence of full-length portraits of dandies, society hostesses and actresses. Captured in mid flow, with his full-length coat and top hat, he appears like a whirling dervish and the perfect embodiment of fin de siecle decadence.
For a time Conder shared a flat in Paris with Lautrec until, tired of his constant pursuit of women, Lautrec threw him out.
Edgar Degas, L'Absinthe 1875-1876. Musée d’Orsay.
The centrepiece of the show is however Degas’ L’Absinthe, which was first owned by Captian Henry Hill of Brighton and exhibited there in 1876. Shown again in London in 1893, the painting caused uproar with its shocking subject matter and composition.
Tales of ‘French degeneracy and drunkenness’ were all the rage in the press at the time and the London press led a campaign against the picture. Of course, Sickert led a counter campaign defending it.
Looking at it today, (Tate have given it a room of its own) it is perhaps difficult to see what all the fuss was about, although some of the printed opinions of the time can be read in the reproduction newspapers that hang from the gallery wall. It is however a remarkable painting and once you have left the furore behind to look at it, the sense of sheer abject despair on the face of the female figure - sat before her glass of Absinthe - belies the fact that Degas used two friends to model for the painting.
Walter Richard Sickert, La Maigre Adeline 1906. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York© The Estate of Walter R Sickert.
The exhibition closes by looking at works created during the first decade of the twentieth century, most importantly by Sickert, Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard. During this period Sickert had at least 16 exhibitions in Paris and several of his nudes, painted at twilight in 1906 when he was working at the Hotel du Quai Voltaire, are included.
Striking for their rawness and realism, some of these pictures may be more shocking to modern eyes than L’Absinthe and they point to a very modern approach to painting the human body.
Intense studies of interiors dominate, but as in the first room it is one artist who seems to have done it first. Degas’ disturbing study of brooding violence, Interior (The Rape) was finished in 1869 and is a difficult painting to decode - evoking an uncanny sense of unease and claustrophobia.
Edgar Degas 1834-1917, Interior (The Rape) 1868-1869. Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Degas, who once said, “Art is vice, you don’t marry it legitimately, you rape it,” never gave the painting the name it now has in parenthesis.
And so it remains as one of his most enigmatic pieces – more so than L’Absinthe. Proof, if it were needed, that although good things may come in threes, someone always, inevitably, rises to the top of the pile.
