Arts & Culture
Two's company, three's a crowd
Published 17 October 2005
As "Degas, Sickert and Toulouse-Lautrec" opens at Tate Britain, Henry Hitchings wonders about the artistic merits of the increasingly fashionable "combination" exhibition
There is a vogue at the moment for galleries to mount exhibitions that resemble those Neapolitan ice creams so popular in the 1970s: three different flavours are squidged into one experience that we are expected to consume whole. The justification is a kind of intellectual kinship - for example, in Tate Britain's "Turner Whistler Monet" earlier this year, James Whistler was claimed as the vital conduit of influence between British Romanticism and the French impressionists. The exercise is suggestive and commercially seductive, yet redolent of that high-street favourite, the "three for two" special offer. It's Academic with a capital A: preoccupied with themes and movements, and with figuring the world of art as a happy confraternity rather than a nest of viperous misfits.
Whistler turns up again in Tate Britain's big new "combination" exhibition, as indeed does a real Neapolitan, Giuseppe de Nittis, a successful landscape painter of the 1870s, once described by the critic Jules Claretie as "French in Paris, and a Londoner in London". Equally at home on either side of the Channel, de Nittis exemplifies nicely the fertile artistic dialogue between the two cities in the late 19th century. Indeed, this is the Tate exhibition's main concern.
Conventional wisdom may cast fin-de-siecle Paris as a gilded pleasure dome without equal, but London was as alluring a destination - "an enormous, opulent society expanding to the enjoyment of . . . wealth and power", as Henry James put it. Edgar Degas came to London to have his suits made, and sold his work while he was about it. His technique was richly appreciated in Britain, and his most enthusiastic collector was not a Parisian flaneur, but a Brighton town councillor, Captain Henry Hill. Among others who sought to capitalise on the appetite for French painting, James Tissot, originally from Nantes, went so far as to settle in London to concentrate on the British market. The Anglophile Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, appalled by Londoners' insobriety, none the less visited the city throughout the 1890s. In 1898, the Goupil Gallery in Regent Street staged the largest exhibition of his work in his lifetime.
Meanwhile, the British travelled in the opposite direction. Walter Sickert (a Londoner who was actually half-Danish and a quarter Irish) studied under Degas and became one of his closest friends. He also served as a passionate advocate of the Frenchman, claiming him to be "perhaps one of the greatest artists the world has ever seen". In return, Degas introduced Sickert into Parisian cafe society and its coterie of intellectuals.
Sickert was not alone in his desire to gorge on the lustrous modernity of Degas's native city. Among the lesser-known artists included in the show, Charles Conder, William Rothenstein and William Warrener moved to Paris to savour both its fashionable nightlife and the intellectual energy of its artistic community. Of the three, it was Conder who entered most fully into the city's spirit, even serving as the model for the epicene diner in Toulouse-Lautrec's Fashionable People at Les Ambassadeurs - he eventually died of syphilis.
The period's exchange of ideas and aesthetic idioms was heady, its fruit an art that revelled in city life and its sexual undercurrents. Degas depicts laundresses and dancers, beautiful and vulnerable. Sickert paints music-hall performers or bravura bedroom scenes. Toulouse-Lautrec gives us The Englishman at the Moulin Rouge (a lush soliciting a pair of prostitutes) and canonises stars of the Parisian demi-monde, such as the cafe-concert performer Yvette Guilbert or the coquettish lesbian chanteuse May Belfort, seen here clutching a depraved little pussycat. All portray streetwalkers and showmen: their natural milieu is the cafe, the theatre, the restaurant and, beyond this, the garret bedroom with its inevitable tangle of sullied sheets.
The trajectory of the Tate exhibition is, essentially, from the public to the private. Early on there are images of Paddington Station, Piccadilly and Haverstock Hill; by the end we are trapped inside Sickert's Ennui and Degas's disturbing Interior (The Rape), claustrophobic scenes of domestic discontent. Degas is, implicitly, the inspiration for this shift. Determined to revolt against the bourgeois taste for quaintly reassuring images, he strove for a more spontaneous and arresting style. "A picture," he claimed, "calls for as much cunning as the commission of a crime." His paintings often suggest photographs - stolen moments - and it is no surprise that he shared with Sickert an enthusiasm for using photographs as templates for his work in oils.
Deeply concerned with the theory of his craft, Sickert spoke of a desire to work from "unaccustomed points of view". Both he and Degas favour unexpected vantage points. In an unfinished Sickert painting, an emaciated Aubrey Beardsley inches through a Hampstead graveyard. Degas, for his part, portrays jockeys before a race, rather than in mid-flow, and his work of a scene from a Meyerbeer opera offers in unwonted detail the organised chaos of the orchestra pit. Another of his paintings shows, from behind, three women leaning on a railing, dressed in brown and rust and with their veiled hats caught by the wind. It prompted a reviewer in Punch to write that it was "a symphony of backs. Or are they moths?"
In keeping with this is Degas's controversial L'Absinthe (1875-76), a painting that affords the viewer a discomfiting sense of uninvited intimacy. Before this exhibition, it had not been seen in London for more than a century. When it was displayed at the Grafton Gallery in 1893, feverish accounts of its unsettling candour convulsed the popular press. Here it dominates an entire room - with only another, much smaller Degas painting, off to one side, for company.
In the opinion of Oscar Wilde, absinthe enabled its consumers to "see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world". The show's curator, Anna Gruetzner Robins, comments that "British gallery-goers of the 1890s would have viewed anyone who was partial to absinthe rather as a crack-cocaine addict is viewed today". But Degas, no moralist, is perfectly uncritical. The man and woman in the painting - recognisably modelled on members of his social circle, yet oblivious of being observed - are bewitching studies in numbness. Moreover, the painting is deliberately located at the heart of the exhibition: after L'Absinthe comes le deluge, a torrential chronicle of hidden lives, stolen entertainments and self-absorbed nonentity.
Sickert emerges as the unlikely hero of the exhibition's compelling second half. In concert with a handful of carefully selected pictures by Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard, his depictions of seedy urban life are piercingly frank. La Maigre Adeline (1906), which takes its name from a line in Baudelaire's "Vin du Solitaire", is disquietingly erotic, while L'Affaire de Camden Town (1909), inspired by the murder of a prostitute, gruesomely foreshadows the work of Lucian Freud. The paintings are sickly, all stewed blue and clay green and muddy reds: the critic Francois Monod wrote evocatively of Sickert's palette being steeped "in the foul flow of the Thames". Virginia Woolf conveyed in rather different terms the rough magic of his achievement, observing that he "always seems more of a novelist than a biographer".
If Sickert is ripe for recuperation - especially in the light of repeated suggestions that he is the "real" Jack the Ripper - Toulouse-Lautrec's reputation is perhaps even more in need of repair. Caricatured as the brilliant hedonist-dwarf-aristocrat of Montmartre, he has had his achievement gaudily puffed up in Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge! and debased by a million reproductions in bad provincial wine bars. His image is not well served by the Tate's exhibition. Part of the problem is that many of his works are in the United States, where "Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre" has only just finished at the Art Institute of Chicago. Yet, in truth, Toulouse-Lautrec's presence, while it looks good on the menu, is not quite digestible. There are chronological and thematic justifications for having him here, but he is never happily integrated into the narrative of an exhibition that could accurately and helpfully - albeit less excitingly - have been dubbed "Degas and Britain" or even "Degas and Sickert". Sometimes two flavours are better than three.
"Degas, Sickert and Toulouse-Lautrec: London and Paris 1870-1910" is at Tate Britain, London SW1 (020 7887 8000) until 15 January 2006. For tickets and further details, go to www.tate.org.uk
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