Degas and New Orleans Book

Readers who've already encountered Christopher Benfey's mesmerizing reverie about race, class, and the Degas family in Civil War-era New Orleans, Degas in New Orleans: Encounters in the Creole World of Kate Chopin and George Washington Cable, may find some of the written material in this large art book repetitive. But the visual accompaniments to the fascinating story of Edgar Degas's New Orleans connections and the time he spent visiting that unique city in the early 1870s are all here. Readers will find an attic's worth of old mail and family photographs, as well as the sketches, drawings, portraits, and scenes Degas painted both while he was there and after he returned to Paris. The Degas family tale contains all the high drama of squandered fortunes, unpaid debts, wartime disarray, hardening racism, marital abandonment, blindness, death, divorce, and disgrace, now publicly aired in hundreds of letters and some old photographs that unwittingly reveal the sometimes pitiful effects of upper-crust insularity and inbreeding. A caveat: all this may ultimately prove equally interesting to social historians as to art lovers. This big coffee-table book promises more visual treats than it ultimately delivers. There are some paintings of the New Orleans cotton exchange that are an important part of Degas's oeuvre and many portraits that are also well known, and the author's careful placement of these works into the context of their times and Degas's career is invaluable for art historians. But the family memorabilia that enriched the exhibition this book catalogs doesn't provide the kind of pictorial richness that made another thought-provoking Degas book, Richard Kendall's astonishing Degas and the Little Dancer, so satisfying on every level--ideally melding sumptuous imagery with enlightenment. More art, one murmurs; less life. --Peggy Moorman Read More