His pictorial exchanges with contemporaries like Matisse and Braque and with predecessors from Rembrandt and Ingres to Cézanne and van Gogh have all been subjected to close scrutiny in the past.
But Degas? Really? Wasn’t the whole point of Picasso that he thrust aside the fugitive effects of 19th-century Impressionists like Degas, and — pushing the innovations of Cézanne, Gauguin, and van Gogh to extremes — opened up a Pandora’s box of distortion, abstraction, and psychological expressionism?
What could the cool, clinical, and naturalistic eye of the old Degas have to offer this young Mephistopheles on the make? You’ll be surprised.
No two scholars, it should be said, are better placed to argue the case than this show’s curators, Elizabeth Cowling and Richard Kendall, both of them British. Cowling is one of the world’s leading Picasso experts, and Kendall, whose idea the show originally was, is the English-speaking world’s preeminent Degas scholar. His 1996 exhibition “Degas: Beyond Impressionism’’ prefigured this show by reminding the world that Degas (1834-1917) was not just a 19th-century artist but a 20th-century one, too — and a radical one at that.
There’s no evidence that Picasso (1881-1973) ever met Degas. But by the end of his life the Spaniard had in his possession a vintage photograph of a dreamlike Degas monotype showing a sleeping nude, a set of Degas monotypes depicting brothel scenes (these inspired a famously bawdy series of Picasso prints in which Degas himself is shown impassively ogling pneumatic nudes in demonstrations of sexual athleticism), and a treasured photograph of the old man himself, who bore, Picasso thought, a close resemblance to his own father.
