Rush Hour at the Museums! The Impressionists Return

Of the mounting of exhibitions devoted to the masters of Impressionism there appears to be no end. Hardly a season is now allowed to pass without some show or other drawn from the capacious oeuvres of Impressionism's Big Four-Claude Monet (1840-1926), Pierre Auguste Renoir (1841-1919), Edgar Degas (1834-1917) and Camille Pissarro (1830-1906)-or otherwise based on some theretofore unexplored aspect of the Impressionist movement. Like all art-world fashions, this one has not been without its episodes of absurdity-the attempt, for example, to elevate a minor talent like Gustave Caillebotte to the status of Impressionist master. On the whole, however, it has been a considerable mercy for people with a serious interest in painting that the art of the Big Four is as great and as varied as it has shown itself to be. For everyone knows that what is driving this long-running vogue in Impressionist exhibitions, which this spring brings Degas at the Races to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., is not what you might describe as a purely disinterested devotion to the Impressionist esthetic.

Everyone in and out of the profession understands that Impressionism, no matter how you slice it, can now be counted upon to be a top box-office attraction. It is guaranteed to draw the crowds, bring plenty of action to the museum shop and restaurant, please the corporate sponsor and make everybody happy-everybody that is, except the few disgruntled holdouts who still somehow prefer to look at pictures under conditions that do not resemble the subway at rush hour.

Yet, though I, too, understand all the reasons why our museums so love to give us so many Impressionist shows, I cannot bring myself to deplore them. More often than not, they have given me a great deal of pleasure and added a lot to my understanding not only of the art of the Impressionists but of painting itself. For it remains a fact, amply reconfirmed in show after show, that Impressionism really was the crucial chapter in which the conventions of Western pictorial art were transformed into something answering to the name of modernism. That is one of the reasons why the best exhibitions of Impressionist painting often illuminate a good deal more than the subject of Impressionism itself, and have the effect of enlarging our understanding of pictorial art prior to Impressionism as well as the modernist painting that derives from Impressionist precedents.

Degas is certainly a central figure in this saga of "tradition" submitted to the esthetic exigencies of modernity and yielding, as a result, an art worthy of taking its place among the greatest masterpieces of the past. No artist of the modern era was more responsive to-or more deeply understanding of-the art of the Old Masters, and none was more inventive in meeting the challenge of creating a modernist art that might prove equal to their endeavors.

In the work of Degas, moreover, there is an element of intellectual gravity, a refusal to settle for the hedonism that is often a weakness in Impressionist painting-especially in Monet's-that sets him apart from his contemporaries. Perhaps because he was a reactionary in everything but his art, he felt his art had to meet a standard that derived from something more durable than the swiftly changing experience of modernity, something more firmly anchored in "tradition." Yet reactionaries are often keener at identifying the distinctive features of modernity than their progressive counterparts, precisely because the reactionary sensibility registers change with fewer illusions about its vaunted benefits.

Given the number of exhibitions that have lately been devoted to Degas, you might think that there was nothing left even in his sizable production that remained to be explored, but such turns out not to be the case. Notwithstanding a title that is suggestive of a Marx Brothers comedy, Degas at the Races gives us a view of Degas we have not seen before-not, anyway, with the density of unfamiliar works that have now been brought together for the first time. Organized by Jean Sutherland Boggs, the doyenne of Degas scholars, who collaborated with Philip Conisbee, the National Gallery's senior curator of European paintings and several of his colleagues, this is a show that might more accurately-if somewhat inelegantly-have been called Degas and the Subject of Horses , for horse racing is by no means its exclusive theme. On the other hand, the racetrack was a distinctly modern social phenomenon in France in Degas' lifetime, and so the title does have the virtue of underscoring the kind of artistic material the artist wrested from his encounter with a modernity from which, in many other respects, he felt deeply alienated.

It has to be understood, of course, that Degas himself was neither a horseman nor a sportsman of any sort. His interest in horses, like his interest in ballet dancers, was entirely pictorial. As far as we know, he did not ride the former nor sleep with the latter. They afforded him the means, however, of finding appropriate modern equivalents for the kinds of subjects-particularly the subject of the body concentrated on some intense and highly disciplined moment of action-that might otherwise have been lost to painting once the depiction of battle scenes, biblical and classical epic, and other such heroic scenarios had been rendered artistically moribund by the dead hand of the Academy.

There is an extraordinary room in the Degas at the Races exhibition in which we are given a riveting account of the artistic labor that Degas invested in this project and the artistic success he achieved in realizing it. On the wall that we face upon entering this room is a masterpiece that few visitors to the exhibition will have seen before-the painting called Scene From the Steeplechase: The Fallen Jockey , which was begun in 1866 and reworked at various intervals until it was either finished or abandoned around 1897. In this version of The Fallen Jockey , the surface has clearly been much labored on, and both the space and the objects that occupy it have the quality of a dream-or a nightmare-that is obviously laden with meaning for the artist himself.

On the wall to the right is a later version of The Fallen Jockey , circa 1896-98, in which everything that is ghostlike and elusive in the earlier version is made stark, vivid, more concentrated and almost brutal in the emotion it conveys. And in the same room there is also, among the studies for the two big versions of The Fallen Jockey , a small painting dating from around 1881 that shows us still another version of the subject called Studio Interior With "The Steeplechase ," in which the back of a shadowy figure in the foreground-which may or may not be Degas himself-is seen to be observing the painting-within-a-painting.

For many visitors to the exhibition, this will be the room they remember longest, for it does seem to confide something about Degas' struggle to achieve the heroic in modern painting that is not elsewhere often made too affecting. But there are marvelous things to be seen in Degas at the Races at every turn-a group of paintings on small laminated wood panels from the 1880's called Before the Race , also rarely seen before in such numbers, and some 20 of the original wax sculptures Degas made of horses to assist him in mastering his portrayal of the animals in motion. These sculptures were once thought to have been entirely lost; they surfaced briefly in an exhibition in New York in the 1950's, and then were promptly lost from public view again. Most of them, in turns out, had gone into the private collection of Paul Mellon, who has also lent a good deal else to this fine exhibition.

There is reason, then, to be a little patient with the current mania for Impressionism exhibitions. Some will no doubt continue to be slapped together for the most cynical of (box-office) reasons, but some will add a good deal to our pleasure and knowledge, and one of these is Degas at the Races , which remains on view at the National Gallery in Washington through July 12, and will not travel.