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Letters - Bibliography - Letter to the Editor
Art Bulletin, The, March, 2001
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 Boggs. He also made sweeping condemnations of certain modes of art history and several untenable assertions about the practice of Edgar Degas. A response is required.
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Mr. Lewis seems to carry a premeditated hostility toward the primary current of Degas studies and hence Miss Boggs. 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 role in a world of relentless (post) modernization." This statement was meant to demolish, but 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 wounds of modernization (if indeed they appear at all) are healed by the subliminal operation of cultural memory." Yes, Degas is an artist to whom "traditional" art historians have been attracted. But such historians--Miss Boggs, Ann Dumas, Douglas Druick, Richard Kendall, Henri Loyrette, George Shackleford, myself, and so on--have not proposed a "restorative role" for Degas's art, nor have they sought sola ce for the alleged wounds 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 own notion of the humanities, Mr. Lewis imputes more power to cultural contexts than is reasonable when writing about the work and career of Edgar Degas. A prime example can be found in his discussion of Degas's Scene from the Steeplechase (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), exhibited at the Salon of 1866. Mr. Lewis understands Degas's picture as a work primarily designed to "transgress Salon norms." No doubt Degas hoped "to perpetrate" (his word) something novel, but it is not certain that transgression was paramount in his mind. Unlike Cezanne or Courbet, for example, Degas did not send paintings to the Salon in the 1860s for the pleasure of insulting the jury. Mr. Lewis seems to believe that Degas could not have invested this picture with symbolic or allegorical meaning, because "antiallegorical avant-garde practice" generates "meaningfulness" differently. But was there ever any such thing as unified "avant-garde practice"? And could the accident Degas depicted in Scene from the Ste eplechase really be meaningless, as Mr. Lewis states? At the least it carries the same tragic message as the Corrida Scene that Manet exhibited in 1864. More disturbing is Mr. Lewis's statement that meaning in Degas's pictures cannot be informed by their human subjects. Degas was a great and constant portraitist; even the anonymous figures in his genre pictures are often given the traits of people whom the artist knew, and their identity often carries meaning. Think, for example, of how 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 implication, for other like artists, there was "a logic" of "vanguardism" that gets "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 pursued themes used by other artists in his circle does not mean that he was a victim of "the competitive impulse within the functioning of vanguardism." The only logic that informed Degas's work, especially at the end of his life, was the internal logic derived from repeatedly returning to a narrow field of themes, subjects, 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 moments he himself chose. He sought to satisfy his curiosity and to try his hand at challenges that he alone set. One freq uent challenge, late in life, was to reiterate motifs from his early career. That is why the reviewer is wrong to question whether Degas was "really" still thinking of his copies from the old masters when he made his late jockey pictures. Yes, of course he was: he was consulting the very portfolios and notebooks where those copies were kept, retouching his early paintings, and even going to the Louvre to copy as late as 1897. It is clear that Mr. Lewis is uncomfortable with the undeniable fact that Degas was nostalgic about his own work and sought to inscribe it within a particular tradition of art.
Your reviewer confidently assumes that his art history is superior to older modes of investigation, such as what he calls, with unmasked contempt, connoisseurship. Yet connoisseurship has never been an interpretive method; it is a practice to deal with questions of authenticity and chronology. Over her long career, Jean Sutherland Boggs, 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 so with modesty and exemplary openness to new interpreters. She would be the first to admit that all art history is imperfect and that no publication is free of error--not least the kind of typographic error that so excites Mr. Lewis. Exhibitions and their catalogues are collaborative efforts that are notoriously difficult to control, with impossible deadlines and conflicting demands.
