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Artistic dialogue explored

February 23, 2006 12:50 am

By SHEILA WICKOUSKI

For THE FREE LANCE-STAR

Our own age is so crowded with fast-breaking events that what was going on in Europe in 1870 has long been buried.

The Franco-Prussian war ended in an overwhelming defeat of France by Bismarck's Germany. The relationships between the nations that would be the key players on the battlefield of the 20th century were taking shape.

After the war, the French were less likely to think of England, with its growing supremacy in finance and industry, as the enemy. Thus the stage was set for modern Europe and for the dialogue among artists working in both London and Paris. This is the basis of a new exhibit at The Phillips Collection in Washington.

The vitality and creativity that existed in these modern epicenters allowed the artists and dealers to move back and forth between the two capital cities and to benefit from the opulent society.

The Phillips exhibit focuses on three of these artists--Edgar Degas, Walter Richard Sickert and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec--and suggests the possible dialogue that existed among them.

Works by other artists, notably James Tissot, William Rothenstein, James McNeill Whistler, Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard, as well as dozens of others, are interspersed throughout the show.

However it is not the exploration of the web of artistic influences that holds the viewers' interest. What captures the mind is the human quality of these works, so refreshing and stimulating in comparison with the highly stylized pieces that were products of the academic salons that existed prior to this time.

The exhibit includes a display of wealth, as in Tissot's "The Ball on Shipboard," which shows an elegant boating party on the Thames. There also are a roomful of portraits of "the dandy," an artificial creature who aspired to verbal wit and leisure hobbies as a means of maintaining his social distinction.

But another theme emerges, as well--more sensational for the time and epitomizing decadence. Degas' "L'Absinthe," with its "degraded types," was highly criticized for its portrayal of the underside of wealth and urbanization. A couple in a Parisian cafe are the picture of numbness, in a drunken stupor induced by potent green alcohol.

As in Toulouse-Lautrec's posters, here is depicted the low-end Parisian nightlife in a beautiful piece of art. Lautrec's "The Englishman at the Moulin Rouge," an image of well-dressed British artist William Warrener engaging in conversation with two suggestive women, is another example of a subject that was too "French" for British Victorians.

It is, of course, chic to love Degas' dancers, whether in paint or in bronze, but there is also his "Interior (The Rape)" to ponder. The ambiguity of the painting, with its lights and shadows, with its half-dressed figures and open suitcase, with its ironic use of an oil lamp suggesting domestic happiness, is unsettling.

This is not the prettiness that is expected of Degas. And that is what is so intriguing about the placement of this work with the nudes that are more pleasant pastels by Degas' friend Whistler, and his followers Bonnard and Vuillard.

Of course, other artists portrayed the excesses of their sinful times, but there is something more compelling about these characters, as if they are prototypes of our own complications in modern life.

This leads to the one aspect of the show that cannot avoid discussion, and that is the work of Sickert. It is not great like that of Degas or Toulouse-Lautrec, and yet Sickert is in their company as one who promoted Degas' work in England.

The two dined often, and Degas inspired Sickert. Also, Duncan Phillips was the first American to own a Sickert.

Sickert, however, might be more familiar as the artist on whom author Patricia Cornwell based "Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper--Case Closed."

He had been an actor, and many of his female portraits are of actresses onstage. Their faces are blurred or reflected in a mirror rather than viewed directly.

In "The Blackbird of Paradise," Sickert creates a woman who is in a fevered delirium, as she sees the bird that signifies her death. Her features are clearer than those of most of his women, but unlike the ordinary plainness in the characterization of his men, her look is ugly, like something out of a horror show.

Sickert's most famous work--and one likely influenced by Degas' "Interior"--is "Ennui." A man and a woman are posed in such a way as to give no doubt that they have nothing to say to each other. The man leans back, seated at the table, with a cigar and a drink. The woman's face is hidden as she looks into a corner, her elbows on a buffet.

Cornwell includes in her book some of these pictures, using Sickert's poses of nudes on the bed as proof of his familiarity with the crime scene. Whether that is true or whether the artist has just gotten bad press, there is little doubt that Sickert's paintings in this show clearly stand out from the rest.

The museum curators clearly meant this to be a show in which the dialogue between the artists in this invigorating time is the central theme. Yet, through their works, the artists have a way of making conversation with the viewer about something more fascinating in human life.

One wonders what these pictures would say if they could talk.