(The following is a partial, and certainly idiosyncratic, impression of the event. I did not take it all in because my cloudy vision isn't up to taking in a lot; tiny blood vessels start to throb and distend and, well, it isn't pretty. So I have cut the thing in half, ommitted a slew of excellent paintings, and have left out some people, like Charles Conder and William Stott of Oldham, who ought to be in here. I hope this maddens everyone with curiosity.)

In the midst of old friends, I feel a sense of comfort the new, and perhaps more dynamic, people in my life cannot supply. I study these old friends for cracks in the old facade, significant hair loss, hearing anomalies, and I still find them very acceptable.
Kurt Vonnegut suggested that we shouldn't entirely forsake those who knew us when we were young - and it's not a bad idea, in spite of what they may remember.

Well, I have always regarded Degas as an old friend of
mine: a cranky one, to be sure. A man never at a loss for the stinging sarcasm and the irreverant jibe, generally at my - or the world's - expense. A small price to pay for having such a fellow in one's embrace, as it were. Degas was certainly the most accomplished draftsman among his Impressionist colleagues. No: he was the only draftsman among them.
One looks in vain for preparatory sketches or schemata in the Impressionist oeurvre. Monet had a brief flirtation with caricature, this is true. And he wasn't bad at it. Had he been more interested in human character and not the play of light on a river-bend or field of poppies, he might have become one of those second-tier artists stuck in the long, annihilating shadow of Daumier - who was a pretty good painter in his own right.

Yet seeing Degas in any context is a cause for jubilation. The Phillips Collection has been wisely restrained in its use of him. He appears sparsely in an exhibit that is, in part, dedicated to his work.
The exhibit has a larger context: to connect Degas - and, to a lesser extent, Toulouse-Lautrec - with colleagues across the English Channel: colleagues who have been under-recorded in Impressionist literature, but were lively, even indispensible, cohorts and contributors.

Whistler too is short-shrifted in the exhibit, but his influence is all over, particularly in the work of Sidney Starr, who weighs in with a space-filled, but defiantly tonalist, canvas (Paddington Station, 1886)that shows the great London railroad station at twilight. Have we heard of Sidney Starr here across The Pond? A few of us have, but he's largely a footnote in an era that is largely a clean slate in our conventional art histories - a largely clean slate scrawled with the names of Pissarro, Monet, Sisley, Renoir, Caillebotte, Bazille, and a few others I'm sure art history students are made to learn by heart.

Then there's Sickert - a man who has gained some notoriety lately for being Patricia Cornwell's Jack the Ripper, the original body-scatcher/hit man archetype who preyed, infamously, on Unfortunates who plied their trade in London's East End - a place with much worse things than mush-mouthed taxi-drivers.
Whether this is true or not, Sickert - who had a knack for compartmentalizing himself, to be sure - became a Master of the Underworld in his own way, using as his social lense both the performers and spectators in the music hall of the 1880's and 90's. At this time, public spectacles were seen to by the likes of William Powell Frith, about whose convention-sized painting of Victoria Station Whistler admitted that it had been finished, but never started. Ford Madox Brown was also a popular sermonizer, who depicted England's working-class in an acceptably didactic - yet dazzlingly Three-D - sort of way that still retains its essential documentary function.

Sickert chose the more frighteningly intimate way of showing society both coming apart, and mending itself, at the seams. His spectators are a not-so-gentile mob; his performers are often isolated by a spotlight
- or by the lascivious gazes of a male audience with things other than sweet Irish ditties on its mind.
Sickert did not care for storytelling per se, and yet there's a world of the unspoken - a narrative trail complex and inviting yet as maddeningly elusive as the man himself. Sickert would disappear for a time in rented rooms where he obviously painted - though we can't really know what else went on in them. With or without the possible opprobrium of a crazed double life, Sickert's paintings provide - as well as close off - a proscenium view of a society with secrets and obsessions.

Sickert didn't like naturalism and was not very nice to Stanhope-Forbes, who was dedicated to a narrative style he, Sickert, found impossibly literal-minded.
The word "jejune" comes to mind; perhaps Sickert himself used it. All I would say is that he should have lived to see photo-realism. (I personally disagree with his anti-naturalism bias.)

Sickert's later work lost some of its immediacy and settled for formalist sophistication. The Phillips has hung this phase of his work - which it owns - in two side rooms. Here an aging Sickert is set off with a few good paintings by Edouard Vuillard - a man whose sensibility can be said to chime in very nicely with Sickert's own.

The naturalist school is represented by George Clausen, in a street-scene (A Spring Morning, Haverstock Hill, 1881) that appears saccharine at first, but upon a second look, yields a multi-layered formal dimension for which such work is rarely credited. Clausen wasn't as interested in his pretty girl - who comes toward us and is in the sharpest focus - as he was in his street-crew or his plaster-sided buildings - all made with his famous square-brush technique. Clausen may still get a bad rap from the anti-narrationists. Too literal! I don't find it so myself, but I tend to prefer the interpreter to the aesthete: the honest storyteller to the social and formalist butterfly Whistler ultimately became.

There isn't much in the way of quantity in the exhibit, so those of us who don't need a whole catalogue of an particular artist's work will be relieved. The vastly overrated James Tissot's insipid and overdressed young idlers do show up, but the greater vitality of his colleagues shouts him down.
Phillip Wilson Steer is represented by a few paintings, the most fluid of which shows a model in a chair (A Girl at Her Toilet, 1892-93). It could have been painted by John Sloan. Sidney Starr's excellent pastel of a carriage-eye view of a city boulevard is a striking example of the sort of cropping for which Degas is justly famous. There are, in fact, just a handful of Degas paintings - mostly interiors of his beloved dancing studios. Another painting (The Ballet for 'Robert de Diable", 1871) shows the affinity he had with Sickert for live performance. He was able to capture set, peformers, and orchestra with a sublime economy loaded with tantalizing half-lights and painterly smudges.

As this is a sort of informal review, I have no intention of including everyone. (I refer the reader to my "disclaimer" at the beginning of this article.) Most of the artists in this show developed deeply personal ways of reacting to their environment; their work is therefore "of a piece." I am writing here about old friends whom I know well enough to forget in some ways. I don't remember what date we met, or with whom. I don't care what any of us was wearing. But I still find I enjoy listening to what they have to say.
Over time, their message has lost is purity perhaps - even some degree of that urgent context out of which a whole body of action may eventually spring - but the old charm remains and I'm glad to have seen so many of them together again. Given the current disrepute of any sort of realism that is not either in sharp focus, or deals with obsolescent classical notions of reality, it is also a rare privilege to have so many tonalists and naturalists together in one space. Both Tate Britain and the Phillips Collection can be credited with this somewhat minor, but significant, change of venue. Before too long, there will be another spate of Impressionist exhibits that'll make lots of money and keep this particular artistic ghetto in the limelight.

For my money, I prefer to see Clausen's navvies,
Starr's twilight, and Sickert's boorish spectators.


- The exhibit runs through May 14th at the Phillips
Collection: 1600 21st Street, NW, Washington, DC 20009, (202) 387-215.