Degas and the Italians in Paris
until February 29; Royal Scottish Academy

I enjoyed this summer’s Monet exhibition as much for its atmosphere as for the art – the newly refurbished RSA was a grandiose venue for a grand occasion, its high ceilings and generous floorspace echoing the hubbub of excited visitors. They knew that the National Galleries of Scotland had twisted arms worldwide to gather together the best possible selection of paintings for this one-and-only Edinburgh event.

Don’t expect the same of Degas. As soon as you enter the RSA’s lofty front portal and hand over your £6.50, you are manoeuvred past the main steps and down a dark side stair instead. Before you know it, you have arrived in a cramped series of underground rooms lacking the Neoclassical grandeur of the main gallery, and that is a sign of things to come.

The exhibition, organised jointly with Ferrara Arte in Italy, plays on Degas’s Italian connections; his father was Italian and so were many of his friends and relatives. As if to prove it, the first room is full of his cousins, painted in the early stages of Degas’s career. They are surprisingly formal and closely worked, for instance in the well-defined features of the Montejasi sisters, and this early classicism is explained in part by the artist’s copy, hung close by, of a Leonardo portrait.

Half of the exhibition is made up of work by four lesser-known Italian artists who were part of Degas’s world in 19th century Paris. Giovanni Boldini makes several bids to steal the show with drawings and etchings which far outshine those of his more famous colleague. The beautifully confident pencil lines of his Figure in a Salon describe the curves of hip and fan with style and economy, while his 15 minute drypoint of Whistler is the most dynamic portrait of a sleeping man you are ever likely to see. By contrast, Degas’s bust-length etching and drypoint of Manet looks quite stolid and gruff.

While Boldini was a master of line, there is no doubting Degas’s genius for mass and colour. Unfortunately this exhibition does little to prove it, with a second class selection of work drawn largely from North American museums. There are a few glittering exceptions, but it is telling that key among these are three paintings in the permanent collection of the National Galleries of Scotland – two of dancers and one of Diego Martelli – that you can usually see for free. Why then did the Galleries not go the whole hog and borrow some of Glasgow’s excellent Degas’s? Politics, no doubt.

The last room makes an effort to raise the standard, with two fine late Degas pastels. These bathers, from San Francisco and Ohio, are the sort of reason why you would go to a Degas show: writhing masses of squiggles in layer upon layer of colour, like private firework displays for our eyes only. The starkly primitive La Coiffure, a late oil from Oslo, commands attention with the drama of its rough handling, earthy colours and elemental poses.

Let me make it explicitly clear here that it is not Degas’s performance I am questioning; it is the Galleries’. The whole show left me with a distinct unease, a feeling that the curators – if there were any – didn’t really care. The rooms were cluttered and confusing, mixing artists and periods in ways which set them against each other unfairly. Boldini’s Study for ‘The Red Café’ had a bad dose of spotlight glare, and as if to let slip that no-one here had much to do with the exhibition, the captions are spelled the American way.

Once you’ve had enough, you trail past a sorry excuse for an exhibition shop, looking for the exit. A warder gives you the nod and opens a discreet back door for you. You walk through the door, like a furtive customer on the run, and find yourself in the middle of a building site. The whole experience – despite the venue, the institution and the subject – is altogether strangely under-the-counter.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 04.01.04