Drawn in by Degas

My favourite outing the few times I’m in Houston is visiting their Museum of Fine Arts. I happened to be there recently when Degas: A New Vision was on display and got to see this retrospective exhibit of this famous French Impressionist’s work—the largest in the US in nearly 30 years!

The exhibit begins with an insightful chronology of Edgar Degas’s life. I cherished this quote from his family because it shows such familial concern yet tenderness for their hardworking artist—something that all families of artists have felt at one time or another. I wish I could have told them from where I stand in history that it’ll be alright.

Degas painted everybody everywhere—from prostitutes sitting in cafés to bourgeois women at concerts; from male patrons loitering backstage at ballets to businessmen making deals on the streets; from the ordinary event of women washing their hair to the spectacle of Parisian society watching a horse race. All these types of paintings were on display at MFAH but I’ll show you a few of my favourites that were particularly exciting to see in person.

Edgar Degas, Rehearsal Hall at the Opéra, rue Le Peletier (1872).

I appreciate that Degas didn’t just paint final performances. He showed the work of preparing for a show—the stretches, repetition, boredom, sweat, and fatigue. He did countless drawings of ballerinas’ movements before he painted them (many of which were also on exhibit), and I like how the description on one of the panels said Degas became such a master of technique that he could tell when a ballerina had done a move incorrectly.

It’s also fascinating to see how he edited his preliminary drawings when he added them to his paintings. Notice in At the Louvre (1879) how the two women change position and the umbrella changes hands. Interesting fact: the woman leaning on her umbrella was fellow Impressionist painter Mary Cassatt.

This ballet rehearsal was probably my favourite to see transformed from a textbook page to the colours and brush strokes on the gallery wall:

Edgar Degas, The Rehearsal (1874).

The composition is so striking. Degas crams all the figures into the upper left and bottom right corners, leaving your eye to wander up the middle where the central ballerina leans forward on one leg. Her outstretched arm connects the gap between her and famous Parisian dance master Jules Perrot. Degas literally renders a slice of contemporary life here through the truncated legs on and around the staircase and the two cropped groups of ballet students—one set working, the other waiting.

Edgar Degas, Theatre Box (1880).

Degas has the reputation of being an acute observer of contemporary life. You can see that in the painting above where he isolates a female theatre-goer in an ornate box. The artificial light of the stage reflects back on her face, making her look ghostly. Going to the theatre is a social event (especially for this time period in Paris), so why is she alone? Degas captures the alienation typical of modernity. I think this painting is another way of showing that feeling of being alone on a crowded street.

Edgar Degas, In a Café (The Absinthe Drinker) (1875-76).

The last work I’ll mention is In A Café (The Absinthe Drinker). Talk about alienation! This painting so moved me when I first studied it in undergrad that years later I wrote a short story about a blind date inspired by it. I like how Robert L. Herbert describes what’s going on in Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society:

Shoulders slumped, eyes cast down, feet splayed out, her costume frowzy, she is the café habituée rooted to her seat, without aspirations. She will derive little comfort from the man next to her, the kind of elbow-leaner who will remain there for hours, eventually shuffling off to an uncertain destination. This is one of Degas’s most devastating images of public life.

There are many devastating things about this painting—how the floating tables trap the man and woman behind their drinks; how the two figures sit beside each other without engaging; how Degas seats us at the table diagonal to these forlorn figures, watching all this as if we too are supposed to be as detached as the painter but we cannot help but be drawn in.

Armpits, Armadillos, and Art

Last week I shared my Austin experience. This week you get to hear my Houston experience. I spent less time there so I don’t know it as well—I never even went downtown. My boyfriend who grew up in Houston describes it as “the armpit of Texas.” I  could see what he meant and I guess other people feel the same.

It’s not that there aren’t nice parts, because there are (I’ll show you some below), but the majority of it is highways and yellowy-beige strip malls that sit half empty. It’s quite depressing how much vacant retail space there is. It’s like the developers built them without knowing if there was a demand, or they’re only occupied for a short season before the business shuts down. I’m looking through my photos and I don’t even have a single strip mall or highway to show you, which I guess demonstrates how uninspired I was by the suburban landscape.

But I did get out of my camera for a lot of other things, such as this weird beer can house that could belong in Austin.

A house made entirely of beer cans

Transco Tower (now called the Williams Tower) is the most distinguishable skyscraper on Houston’s skyline, and it’s not even downtown. It’s located in the Uptown District. This office tower with a beacon on top was built by New York-based John Burgee Architects with Philip Johnson—the famous architect who designed the Glass House. You can see that glassy influence on this postmodern tower which is the 4th tallest in Texas.

Opposite Transco Tower is the Waterwall that I alluded to in my last post. I stood under its Roman arches and heard the thunder of 11,000 gallons of water spilling over the edge. Its height is also significant as 64 feet references the 64 stories of the Transco Tower.

The other highlights of Houston, also in the Uptown District, were their fabulous museums. We first checked out the Museum of Natural Science which required much more than the 2.5 hours we gave it. Still, we managed to see the Lester & Sue Smith Gem Vault, the Hall of Ancient Egypt, and the Morian Hall of Paleontology (rather rapidly).

A sample of one of the cool configurations of fossils in the paleontology hall

dinosaurs, dinosaurs everywhere!

Did you know the nine-banded armadillo is the state mammal of Texas?

On the way out I snapped some pics of beautiful Hermann Park across the street with a large spider sculpture in the middle of the reflecting pool, reminiscent of Ottawa’s spider in front of the National Gallery of Canada.

This area of town is called the Museum District for a reason, so we visited The Museum of Fine Arts until we called it a day. I was really impressed at the size and quality of their collections, and especially how many Impressionist paintings they had (my favourite kind!)

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

The Orange Trees by Gustave Caillebotte, 1878.

Water Lilies (Nymphéas) by Claude Monet, 1907.

The Rocks by Vincent van Gogh, 1888.

We only had time to do the European and American collections, but we did walk through this bamboo-style installation made of 24,000 plastic tubes that hang 28 feet from the ceiling to the floor. Venezuelan artist Jesus Rafael Soto has made 25-30 of these works he calls “Penetrables” that “epitomize his investigations into space and movement. For Soto, space was a perceptual field that had to be experienced, not just with the eyes but with the entire body and senses.” (quoted from the plaque) Soto was a pioneer of the Kinetic Art Movement. I’m a fan. I love interactive art, especially ones you can get lost in!

Soto: the Houston Penetrable by Jesus Rafael Soto. It was exclusively created for this exhibition hall designed by architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

So there you have it, a snapshot of my Austin & Houston experiences. Contrary to what everyone had been telling me and how it normally is, Houston actually had “cooler” temperatures than Austin. God knows I needed it! There was a massive thunderstorm while we were touring the MFA and it was impressive to hear rain pounding so loudly on the roof. I thought a machine had gone haywire in the building. Vancouver gets a lot of rain, but not like that! I was telling an older gentleman in Austin about the Houston storm when we returned to Austin to finish the trip, and his response was, “Well, what can I say? We Texans like to put on a show for y’all!”