A Different Way of Seeing

By ANN LANDI

Nyack, N.Y.

New York City is playing host to two Picasso shows this summer, but the most challenging and provocative exhibition dedicated to that colossus of 20th century art may be nestled deep in the Berkshires at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass. "Picasso Looks at Degas" presents the two artists side by side and offers a radical rethinking of some of the younger man's work. Whether paying homage to Edgar Degas or poking fun at his aristocratic hauteur, Pablo Picasso was deeply engaged with his work on and off for seven decades, even before he set foot in Montmartre at the age of 22. (Though they most likely never met, the two lived within a few blocks of each other in that raffish artists' neighborhood.)

Ken Fallin

Richard Kendall

Picasso's relationships with contemporaries such as Matisse and antecedents like Cézanne and Velázquez have been exhaustively explored in scholarly theses and museum shows. His connection to Degas, who was almost 50 years his senior and bore an uncanny resemblance to the Spaniard's father, is trickier territory, which this exhibition explores in smart compare-and-contrast style, with stunning masterworks from both artists.

"We know about Cézanne and his importance for modern art, almost to a fault. We know about Monet and his significance as a colorist. But no one has been thinking about Degas and his impact on the 20th century," says Richard Kendall, who first had the idea for the show 10 years ago and proposed it to Picasso scholar Elizabeth Cowling, professor emeritus of art history at the University of Edinburgh, and his co-organizer for the exhibition.

Mr. Kendall, who makes his home in Nyack and is a curator at large for the Clark, has been absorbed with the life and work of Degas for more than two decades. "He's been a constant passion, and frankly there is no rational explanation for it. He tends to get marginalized in studies about Impressionism—he's the odd man out," he says. "But I began to think there was much more to this artist than meets the eye. The more I looked at his art, the more I got hooked."

Born in China, the son of missionaries, Mr. Kendall went to school in London and describes himself as "the kid in art class who could draw and who won all the prizes." He began his career as a painter, studying at the Central School of Art and Design in London, but gradually drifted toward art history, earning a master's degree from the prestigious Courtauld Institute of Art in 1971 (his master's thesis was on the Italian trecento painter Duccio). For the next 14 years, teaching posts in Manchester, England, allowed him to pursue both his path as an artist and his interest in art history. "I could teach four days a week, and I could paint three days a week," he says. But even before doing his first exhibition at the Tate Gallery in Liverpool on Degas in 1989, he called the 19th-century master, probably still most renowned for his images of dancers, "my guy."

Degas Through Picasso's Eyes

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Michael Agee

Edgar Degas's 'Little Dancer Aged Fourteen' (1879-81)

Numerous essays, scholarly articles, books and exhibitions dedicated to Degas followed, including a large show at the National Gallery in London and the Art Institute of Chicago, "Degas: Beyond Impressionism," which earned Mr. Kendall a couple of prizes and, he says, "nearly killed" him. The show tackled the artist's problematic late art head-on. "Nobody had looked at his late techniques and his methods of working. And because I had trained as an artist, I took to that instinctively," he explains. In works from the 1890s and the first decade of the 20th century, "he seems to be carving out a new language of art, which is certainly not classicist anymore, nor is it romantic in a capital R way," he explains. "It seems to be expressionism of a kind, where the human body is still there, but Degas takes it to places that no other artist had taken it before. The body almost seems to disintegrate, even though he's still working from models."

In those years, when Degas was in his 60s, he was very much aware of the younger generation snapping at his heels—not just Picasso, but artists like Edouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard, the American Max Weber, and the English painter Walter Sickert. Most of them were represented by dealer Ambroise Vollard, who was also in the neighborhood. Degas knew of the Cubist revolution that first began to roil the avant-garde around 1907, famously remarking that "it was harder to do than painting." Mr. Kendall doesn't regard this statement as necessarily dismissive. "He's saying, 'These guys have got something and it's even beyond what I've been doing.' He was remarkably tolerant of and encouraging toward young artists. He didn't deny the value in their work."

For his part, Picasso mined the older artist's output for subjects throughout his long career, making a series of ballet pictures, for example, or taking up Degas's fascination with women bathing or at their toilette, women caught in the most private of moments. One of the curators' more radical assertions is that Picasso initially borrowed and then discarded the stance and pose of Degas's "Little Dancer Aged Fourteen" for a figure in what is still one of the most shocking paintings of all time, the "Demoiselles d'Avignon" of 1907, a scene of five ferocious nudes in a brothel.

Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artist Rights Society (ARS)

Pablo Picasso's 'Standing Nude' (1907), a study for his painting 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon' of the same year.

"This is so against the record, so against the sacred text, that we approached the connection very cautiously," Mr. Kendall says. "I did a lot of research behind the drawings for the 'Demoiselles,' of which there are literally hundreds, and this figure kept popping out at me." Shown side by side at the Clark, Picasso's hatchet-faced "Standing Nude" of 1907, with her arms behind her back and one leg aggressively thrust forward, does seem to borrow the cocky stance of Degas's cheeky little ballerina. That both works ruffled more than a few feathers in their day for breaking with tradition and hinting at a certain louche sexuality only fortifies the connection.

"It's things like this that really drive me to do exhibitions," says Mr. Kendall. "I'm not really interested in shows where you get 15 great Monets and hang them on the wall. I like the idea of an exhibition as an argument, which puts forth new research and asks you to think again about this art. With these big guys, there is almost a moral duty to say something new to justify the gigantic amounts of money on installation and travel."

As an independent curator, Mr. Kendall has a certain amount of freedom to pick and choose his subjects. Up next is a show on Degas and the ballet with his wife, Jill DeVonyar, a former dancer turned curator. "She's been a major influence on me, because she taught me a lot about ballet," he says. Mr. Kendall also has a book in the works about the intellectual context of Impressionism. "They lived in an intensely scientific society, everything from cutting-edge research to popular science magazines." One early excerpt of this, "Monet and Monkeys, the Impressionist Encounter with Darwinism," was recently published in an anthology from Yale University Press.

Mr. Kendall no longer has time to pursue his own artistic impulses, but he credits his training with giving him a different way of looking at the masters. "The fact that I've made pictures and sculptures myself doesn't answer all the questions," he admits, "but it tends to focus your mind in a slightly different way. I'm always asking, 'How did he do that?'"

Ms. Landi writes on culture and the arts.