Degas Monotypes

YEARS AGO at the Metropolitan Museum, I fell in love with the sculptures of Degas. Like most enthusiasts who are only familiar with his pastels or oils. I was surprised to find that he had sculpted at all. The same surprise was renewed last week at the Fogg in discovering the Degas monotypes. Both these media were exceedingly personal ones for Degas, and knowledge of them will deepen and broaden the understanding of anyone who is familiar with his epoch only through its paintings.

Degas, unlike most other artists of his time, was firmly entrenched in the great tradition of classical French draughtsmanship. It may come as a revelation to many that beneath his pretty colors he was the self-proclaimed inheritor of that archetype of neoclassicism, Ingres. Why, then, did he find so "unworked" a medium as the monotype suitable to his purposes?

Degas did not invent the monotype, but he used it and developed it to a far greater extent than any artist before him, and possibly since him. Briefly, it is a process in which greasy ink is applied to a plate and wiped away with rags and/or blunt and sharp instruments (dark field manner), or one in which one draws with the ink on the plate (light field manner). The paper is then run through a press with the plate. But unlike the output of other graphic media, only a few impressions at most are obtainable. Also unlike most other graphic media, the process is and appears far more spontaneous and casual, seemingly closest in nature to drawing.

Yet it is the monotype's very divergence from the quality of a drawing that most attracted Degas. As Mrs. Janis, who put the current exhibition together, has pointed out, Degas devoted so much time to the monotype in order to free himself as much as he desired from the classical constraints of his innate sense of line. With a rag he was able to wipe away ink and compose in broad spaces. Privately modeling in this medium, as in the sculpture, Degas was able to counterbalance his draughtsmanship and realize form and volume. Publicly, the result was the marvelously transitory, captured, psychological quality of his work. This sense of spontaneity made him among the first to utilize in his paintings the nature of the then infant process of photography.

DEGAS for these and other reasons was very fruitful and influential for the younger generation, among whom were Lautrec, Vuillard, Bonnard, and other post-impressionists. Indeed, there are those who will contend that Lautrec built solidly and indispensably on every aspect of Degas' production. Far more exciting, I feel, is the way in which his own indefatigable efforts lightened the historical burden for the next great inheritor, Henri Matisse, and facilitated the transition into the twentieth century. This was my personal discovery in the show, the piece of puzzle that so happily fell into place for me. Just as Degas was the disciple of Ingres, so Matisse, I believe, was the descendant of Degas in the classical French tradition. In, for example, the brothel scenes (Catalog#'s 18-25) in Gallery XII, we can already sense Matisse's future spaces and decorative forms.

The exhibit itself has been mounted with great sensitivity to the viewer's relaxed involvement. Galleries XI and XIII have been filled with large works; in XI, a series of very powerful dark field nudes and interiors (e.g., Le Foyer, #37, or Femme Au Bain, #31); in XIII, a colored, proto-abstract landscape series. In the central room, divided by partitions, the smaller, more casual works have been mounted in groups, much as they would have appeared on the wall of a late nineteenth century room. Flowers on console tables bring out the color of those monotypes which have been reworked with pastel. A few chairs help to enhance this pleasant evocation of an interior.

In the adjacent galleries (XIV and XV), a display of Fogg graphics and paintings by contemporaries of Degas is available for comparison and teaching purposes. (In particular, note two Degas paintings: an oil sketch, "Cotton Merchants," and a finished painting, "Mme. Oliver Vilette," which bear out the Degas-Matisse relationship.)

One of the real delights of art history comes in the fitting together of pieces of a puzzle. For experts in the field much of the scholarly information has long since slipped into place, but it is ever the privilege of the individual viewer, however amateur his status, to discover newness in the visual evidence itself. The Fogg's imaginative and exciting exhibition offers a wonderful opportunity for such discovery.