Whatever else may be wrong with the late American art industry, we are living in the golden age of the retrospective exhibition. One by one, the great artists of the 19th century have been done over the past decade: Cezanne, Manet, Courbet, Van Gogh, Gauguin -- and now Edgar Degas. We may deplore the crowds at these shows, the souvenir selling, the social circus and the TeleTron tickets at up to $7.75 apiece, an outrageous tax on knowledge. Earplugs -- preferably not attached to Acoustiguide gadgets -- and yogic detachment are needed. There are, as crusty old Degas said, some kinds of success that are indistinguishable from panic. But such shows will not be repeated in our lifetime.
Not in 50 years has there been a major Degas retrospective, and probably never again will so many of his drawings, paintings, prints and sculptures be assembled in one place at one time as in the huge show of more than 300 works that opens this week at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Nor are we likely to see again such a massive scholarly effort -- literally massive: the catalog, with its essays by art historians Jean Sutherland Boggs, Douglas Druick, Henri Loyrette, Michael Pantazzi and Gary Tinterow, weighs a tad over 6 lbs. Thanks to their efforts and those of the three museums that mutually organized the show -- the Musee d'Orsay, the National Gallery of Canada and the Met -- we have the means to see this extraordinarily complicated and sometimes elusive painter with a completeness not possible before.
It is curious that it should have taken so long. There was not even a full- scale biography of Degas until 1984, when Roy McMullen's Degas: His Life, Times & Work was published. Aspects of Degas's work -- mainly his ballet paintings from the 1880s -- have long been popular with a broad audience, too much so for their own good. But he has never been a "popular" artist like the wholly inferior Renoir, whose 1985 retrospective in London, Paris and Boston beguiled the crowds and disappointed everyone else. Degas was much harder to take, with his spiny intelligence (never Renoir's problem), his puzzling mixtures of categories, his unconventional cropping, his "coldness." The long continuities of his work have not always been obvious. Degas was the most modern of artists, but his kind of modernity, entailing a passionate working relationship with the past, hardly exists today. How we would have bored him, with our feeble jabber of postmodernist "appropriation"!
In his late years, Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas was chatting in his studio with one of his few friends and many admirers, the English painter Walter Richard Sickert. When they decided to visit a cafe, young Sickert got ready to summon a horse-drawn cab. Degas objected. "Personally, I don't like cabs. You don't see anyone. That's why I love to ride on the omnibus -- you can look at people. We were created to look at one another, weren't we?" No passing remark could take you closer to the heart of 19th century realism: the idea of the artist as an engine for looking, a being whose destiny was to study what Balzac, in a famous phrase that declared its rebellion from the theological order of Dante's Divine Comedy, called La Comedie Humaine.