28 August 2026
National Gallery with Toby today, so many nice moments. But perhaps none more satisfying than standing with him in front of Degas's Hélène Rouart in her Father's Study (1886). He re-oriented my view on the work (and Degas more generally).
For some reason, I suppose based on the selected reading I've done and my relatively limited knowledge of his oeuvre, I've always had it in my head that Degas was the prettier and more accessible one in relation to Manet. And for some works that still holds true. But Toby is quite attuned to his idiosyncrasies, the formal painterly challenges setup within each of his works, and the often confounding logic of his choices. Some blips I remember: “incidents and accidents” around recording, resistance to decoding while observing, the work's relationship to provisionality.
It's a strange painting, askew and loose. The physical encounter with it is a floaty, sensuous, disorienting experience. Framings abound, (the edge of the red silk wall-hanging, the glass case containing Egyptian statues, the back of the chair, the literal frame around Corot’s Castel dell’Ovo in Naples), and they all collapse and compress into flatness despite suggesting a network of distinct and different spatial planes. The glass case in particular becomes a portal, like an open door to a hallway that piereces through the left side of the composition. The eye travels like a fly trying to escape a room. And those precarious, gummed up stacks of paper at the bottom left resting on a maroon blob of a surface-table-floor. Simply a pile of color. Green-blue-gray-orange-yellow-pink held together by a few suggestions of edge; the incident. Perhaps not unlike the disheveled spread at the bottom left of Le Déjeuner, actually.