Synopsis:
American collectors, critics, and artists played a key role in introducing Degas's art to the United States. Featuring reproductions of well-known masterpieces and little-known treasures, Degas and America celebrates the artistic savvy of the Americans who helped make impressionism the most popular movement in modern art. Early taste for Degas in America embraced his work in all media-oils, pastels, drawings, prints, and sculpture. Essays by an impressive group of scholars explain how the early collectors of Degas's work helped to shape his career and our image of the artist.
Review:
In the 1880s and '90s, when Monet's paintings were all the rage in Boston and New York, American critics disapproved of Degas's strange use of color and depictions of lowly urban life--Huysmans memorably described a Degas pastel of women bathers as "the marriage and adultery of color." Yet individual American collectors fell in love with Degas's works and bought them enthusiastically. French resentment of this was summed up in Jacques-Emile Blanche's phrase, "a stampede of irresponsible American millionaires." Degas shared the emotion, though he was generous to his wealthy patrons such as Mary Cassat and Louisine Havermeyer, and was the only impressionist ever to visit America (New Orleans, 1872-73). The Met, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Art Institute of Chicago, and other institutions eventually followed the private collectors with wide-ranging purchases, so that today most of the world's outstanding collections of works by Degas are in America. The High Museum in Atlanta and the Minneapolis Institute of Art have organized a fascinating exhibition tracing the process of Degas's reception. The exhibition's catalog, Degas and America: The Early Collectors, illustrates 86 drawings, paintings, and sculptures by Degas acquired or exhibited in America around the turn of the century. Some of his most lyrical studies of ballet dancers and finest portraits are included. The provenance of each work, the collectors who owned and appreciated it, is discussed, giving an intimate dimension to the individual objects. Degas and America is an unusual study of the art of collecting, as well as the arts of drawing and painting. --John Stevenson
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