Letters - Bibliography - Letter to the Editor

Modern art's relation to tradition: When Degas copied Mantegna's Minerva Chasing the Vices from the Garden of Virtue (BR144) in 1897, was he being a traditional artist? Traditional art's use of past art could be conceptualized in terms of adding another link in the chain of tradition, even if fresh variations with established schemata were involved. Modern art's use of past art is predicated on modern art's self-possessive individualism. (Degas's late copy of Mantegna does not look like a later Renaissance or 17th-century copy would have looked. Degas is interested in only certain extrapolated qualities of the image, its dancelike rhythms rather than its symbolic content.) To put it crudely, modern artists use past artworks freely for whatever they want. Much discussion of the use of tradition fails to establish such difference, and so frequently modern art ends up being misrepresented (via discussion of the use of sources) as traditional. This point applies as much to Degas as to anyone else. Tinterow unreas onably conflates nostalgia, reference to past artworks, and traditionalism.

This does not mean that I do not recognize that Degas was nostalgic for the way Renaissance art had operated. That is a contrary impulse to Degas's will to be modern. Here we return to the fact that traditional art history proposes a notion of causation that denies history, by grounding causation in self-determination, even where contrary impulses in the human subject cry out for a broader historical explanation.

ADRIAN LEWIS

De Montfort University

Notes

Leicester, UK LE1 9BH

(1.) There is a major difference, of course, between a picture representing an individual (a portrait) and one in which a model has been used to put together an image with a particular construction of meaning. Professor Tinterow elides this difference. Tinterow uses Au Louvre (L581) to try to underscore his point that meaning includes who the model is, hut Au Louvre is a modern-life genre scene that only hints at also being a double portrait. The point is ultimately methodological, as caught by Barthes's 1971 essay 'From Work to Text." Does the standing figure in Au Louvre mean what pose, image construction, intertextual connections, and discursive context led it to mean to its various audiences, or does the person from whom the image was made constitute the picture's meaning?

(2.) Rewald came to feel later that its Salon acceptance was because of the more polished nature of its original state before subsequent reworkings, an unconvincing (essentially negative) explanation.

(3.) Even more startling is the lack of real explanation by traditional art historians as to why Degas went on to perpetuate the reprise of Steeplechase in the Kunstmuseum Basel's late Fallen Jockey (L141). To fill in her lack of explanation, Boggs quotes an in-house Kunstmuseum Basel study celebrating the painting as "a bridge to expressionist and abstract art." Nowhere does she or anyone else ask the question as to why, having studied Muybridge on horse movements, Degas should rework his first publicly exhibited modern-life image in a naive style contrary to the rest of his later practice. If we remember that the Basel painting is identical in size to the original painting, perhaps we might see it as a metalinguistic comment on his prior practice and the means by which he had generated a "reality effect" in the studio. Looked at that way, what Boggs calls the "rag-doll" look of the fallen jockey in L141 might bring to mind Portrait of a Painter in His Studio (L326), with its lay figure depicted as a limp do ll beside the authentic-looking awkwardness of the picnicking pose that it had been used apparently to concoct. The Basel Fatten Jockey looks similarly drained of that lifelikeness to which studio fabrication had earlier given rise. It is here the impulse to contradict the earlier priority of truth over art that needs to be historicized.

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