Degas, Sickert and Toulouse-Lautrec grace the moving new public display at the Phillips Collection with works that speak to each other in a visual dialogue that is more powerful than words.
The exhibit features works from London and Paris circa 1870-1910, highlighting the exchange of artistic style and patronage across the English Channel. The collection centers on the influence of Edgar Degas, whose dramatic composition and innovative technique permeate the work of his contemporaries. More than simply emphasizing the ideological and historical significance of the exchange, however, the exhibit pulls its audience into a contrasting world of vibrant spectacle and somber reality.
The collection commences with James Tissot’s “London Visitors,” which invites spectators into an elaborate display of works depicting the daily lives of Londoners and Parisians and proves, in retrospect, deceptive in its simplicity. A series of lighthearted, bustling scenes of public life vividly depict subjects who seem to glance wistfully at the surrounding various canvases in the room.
This impersonal glimpse of city life, however, soon digresses into a view of the private domestic lives of the city dwellers. The internal reality which these proletarian workers face simultaneously distances and awes the observer.
Among the most successful elements of the exhibition is its distinct environment, which accentuates the viewing experience of the artwork. Walter Sickert’s “Second Turn of Miss Katie Lawrence,” a dark-toned depiction of a theatrical performance, hangs in a dimly-lit room, pulling the viewer into the audience of the foreground to marvel at the radiant figure center stage.
Past Sickert’s London theater works and Toulouse-Lautrec’s spirited posters of the Moulin Rouge, the viewer enters a comparatively vacant room, in which hangs Degas’ ominous “L’Absinthe.” Two rather solemn figures seated in a café, sipping absinthe before breakfast, are starkly juxtaposed with several amusing, lackadaisical works nearby. This artful arrangement, teetering between the realms of performance and reality, creates a provocative, complementary relationship among the compositions.
The exhibit’s third floor boasts a rather divergent array of subject matter. A display of works of Dandyism, conveying a paradoxically humorous disdain for bourgeois decadence, transitions to more emotionally insightful works of nudes and interior figures. Degas’ “Interior (The Rape)” draws the viewer into the dark reality of the bedroom and introduces a series of nudes, rendered by various artists but indubitably connected by an approach to realism and psychological expression. The works, as Degas phrased it, offer an intimate view of ordinary life “as if you looked through the keyhole.”
The Phillips Collection often seems to take great pride in providing an environment conducive to a personal and engaged experience with its artworks, and this exhibit, while exceptional, is certainly no exception to this objective.
