Art: The Hard Way

As he grew older, Edgar Hilaire Germain Degas, once a dandy of dandies, became a surly misanthrope. He turned his favorite Delacroix to the wall so that others could not enjoy it. Invited out to dinner, he insisted that there be no dogs around, and no flowers on the table, lest other guests indulge in sentimentalities. This was the Degas whom the French poet and philosopher Paul Valéry came to know, an old man raging at his enemies and riding alone on the tops of buses.

Last week an English translation of Valéry’s essay on Degas appeared in U.S. bookstores (Degas Dance Drawing; Lear, $5). It pictured the 19th Century master as coolly and deftly as Degas used to picture worn little ballet girls.

Yearning for Secrets. Degas, Valéry reported, did everything the hard way. He “concealed behind harsh and arbitrary opinions … a despair of ever satisfying himself; his bitter and lofty views developed along with his penetrating knowledge of the masters; his yearning for the secrets he ascribed to them; his perpetual awareness of their baffling perfection.”

Degas’ strong point, Valéry thought, was his “taste, a quality rather uncommon among artists.” His taste made him as critical of his own work as he was of his critics; when people praised him he laughed in their faces. “He could not conceive of an artist seeing one of his paintings after a lapse of time without wanting to work on it again. Occasionally he would even carry off paintings that had hung for a long time on the walls of friends’ rooms, taking them back to his lair, from which they rarely reappeared. A few of his intimates were driven to hiding the paintings of his they possessed.”

Seizing the Grimaces. His work does not sing, says Valéry flatly. “Grace and obvious poetry were not his objective.” In his drawings, he seemed almost wholly concerned with the truth of what he saw. “His dancers and laundresses were seized in professionally significant attitudes which permitted him to … analyze various poses never before of interest to painters. He abandoned the beautiful, soft, reclining bodies, the delectable Venuses and Odalisques . . . But he was intent on reconstructing the particular female animal, slave of the dance, the laundry or the street. These more or less deformed bodies he forced into unstable attitudes (such as doing up a ballet shoe or ‘pressing down an iron with both hands). They reminded one that the entire bodily mechanism … is capable of grimacing like a face.”

In conversation Degas could be “sparkling and unendurable, enlivening the dinner-table . . . with wit, terror and gaiety . . . exhibiting all the characteristics of a most prejudiced intelligence.” But when the bachelor grew old and blind he used to lapse into terrible silences, broken by the words “I think only of death!” At 70, 13 years before his death in 1917, Degas told a visitor that “One must have an exalted idea, not of what one does, but of what one will some day accomplish. Otherwise there is no use working.”

“That,” Valéry adds, “is real pride, antidote to all vanity.”