An encounter with a gorgeous living being long thought dead
We turned the corner of the Central Staff Office in St. Petersburg, Russia and I saw it right away. And, I knew it was wrong.
Central Staff or the Palais de L'état-major is a non-descript olive terrace catty corner and across the Palace Square from the Hermitage. There is no sign. No billboard. Oddly there is no reference to what this building houses at the Hermitage and so many of us standing in queue (perhaps a dozen) might distractedly say “Oh right, military costumes. I’ll skip that and make sure I see the Rembrandt hallway instead.”
Here in front of us (a yoga tour group, only here as a testament to our great stamina, grit, and drive to see every last museum in Russia) now, this Degas painting suddenly manifested.
We are told that this painting was seized from the Nazis in 1945 and stored underground for 50 years. It was broken out of a box a little while ago and the State made some big unveiling during a ceremony that I can only suppose the Moscow correspondents overlooked.
Years ago I idly thumbed through my Hardcover Overview on Degas. The complete book. Listed here in my Abrams hardcover it says: The Place de la Concorde. “Lost in the blitzkrieg.”
The greatest of draughtsman. The worst human being imaginable (more on anti-Semitism later) Degas -- gleefully combing his La Libra Parole for its horrid little tales of Jewish punishment narratives. What is the inverse of erotica? Sadista, perhaps. Grotesques.
He stands alone among the Impressionists as both like Fantin Latour--a master craftsman of tone, line, edge, pattern, and surface, and yet also like the Fauve Matisse he is an avant-garde thinker and a Master of the Modernist Act. Which is to say he was discourteous and aristocratic enough to turn his academic virtuosity on its head and intentionally break with the Classical norms of the Golden mean. Like when Dizzy Gillespie would sometimes slip into 12 tone scales igniting the fury of band leader Cab Calloway. “Stop with those Chinese notes, Dizzy!” he would scream.
An astounding painting. Degas (fascinated with the effects of photography on how we see.. how we see our lives.. how things are seen) anticipates the 21st century with a tour de force.
His painting of Viscount Lepic (The grandson of a Napoleonic general) and his daughters crossing the Plaza breaks every rule of Classical organization of portraiture. His models pay no attention to us. He cuts off the feet (the American shot—so called because Europeans noticed that the ignorant American cinematographers kept cutting off the shoes in their films) One man on the far left is cleaved in twain. There is no, as Arnheim said it, there is no center, no gravity to the middle. There is no there, there. As Gertrude Stein once said of Oakland.
He violates Classical form. He violates society. And that is how Degas, a natural aristocrat, became bohemian. He breaks Classical norms to create visual music. He destroys Academia in way that Academics adore. Now every art student in America paints this way.. like photography. They have no other point of reference.
We have found this quote from the LA Times in 1995 with the Hermitage Museum director Mikhail Piotrovsky:
"We are a museum, not a court. And this will be an exhibition, not a trial. But, there is one thing you must keep in mind. The Germans destroyed a lot of things, and our country cannot forget this.”
Leisure is grotesque. Our simple fates as yoga practitioners, as yoga teachers, as world travelers, as art aficionados suggest that we are of leisure class and that is what Degas painted the whole of his career, until he turned 50. And then the Dreyfus affair and Emile Zola and his fellow anti-Semite Renoir said “he really becomes Degas.’ He turned his vision inward through the keyhole on to the Woman at her toilette. This we all long for. When the petty rivalries and ambulations of the day are over we have the bath and love-play.
This is the truly grotesque thing… that we have time.
This tour is only at the beginning though. The Central Staff houses critical Picassos in his most important evolutionary period from Rose to African to Cubism. Woman with a Fan, for example. Both of them, of course. Matisse’s Dance. Matisse’s Music. I walked down a wall of Matisse that looked like well over a billion dollars in open market bidding. The Dance by itself would bring $600 million. That’s to start bidding. Though almost no one is here.
Let me reiterate. This is World Cup Russia. This is the busiest any Russian has seen Russia. And, this is the busy season any way. Normally in winter no one is here.. ever. On this floor of this museum. It’s the Fourth of July. There are eight people.
This museum even houses the largest and best collection of Fantin Latour.. of course. Because of the Romanoffs. Because of Catherine. Because of Ivan. Empire. Slavery. In that order.
This trip through the Hermitage and the discovery of this Degas and Matisse’s Dance allowed me all at once to understand the Russian character. To understand why the Romanoffs were executed and eliminated, why revolution was necessary and why the Sympathy for the Devil.
It is because the excess, here, was grotesque.
The Louvre carries 35,000 visitors per day. The collection of art in Russia dwarfs the Louvre. Louis the Sun King may have made good Beaver money, good Africa money. But he didn’t have Russian Empire money. Slave money. America in 1860 had 3.1 million slaves and was arguably responsible for its great wealth.. great cotton wealth (of which House De Gas was a beneficiary) Russia in 1860? 23 million slaves. When the Empress sent her agents to the Auction houses in London and Paris and they found something good, that everyone liked (like a Ter Borch, a Gabriel Metsu, a Rubens, a Rembrandt) They would outbid.. and then buy ten more.
The absence of marketing materials to the most precious of objects in Art History liberated from abroad and housed and ignored by the State (or “liberated” by the People from the industrialists Ivan Morozov or Sergei Shchukin-who commissioned the manufacture of the Dance) defines the present Russia Identity:
“It’s here. We have great things. Of course we do. Come see them, or not.”
This, in closing, reminds me of Nicholas II. The last Romanoff. Well.. Anastasia who screamed in vain as the first bullets bounced off the diamonds and stones sewn in her petticoat, she was last, but only by a few minutes and 15 meters away. The royals along with the traditional system of measurement go the way of the guillotine. This is Modernism. 2.26 meters of .02 seconds of death. The guillotine is about efficiency and intention of purpose. This is where the German Socialist Bauhaus glean the clean lines of the Mid Century Moderne. The execution of indulgence.
A sweet boy who fought for the end of the anti-Jewish pogroms, though perhaps cynically and with an eye towards how things would look to the public like his grandfather, Alexander the II, who ended slavery Nicky was assassinated though clinically and with the State’s sanction--a just sentence of death as our courts might say. The Russians on the street will tell you that the sweet and generous Romanoffs were usually and typically killed. The strong and cruel like Ivan, and Catherine, and Peter they endured and thrived and Mother Russia expanded. These Russians are descended from the Nogai Horde. They are Mongolian like the Mughals and the Timurids who took India. There is a certain kind of nonchalant respect given to power here. Most folks go about their day like Dostoyevski’s Raskolnovikov, understanding full well the consequences of their crimes and their place here. It’s the bottom.
Meanwhile the aristocrats Degas and Lepic stroll the plaza for eternity.