Degas and Cassatt: A Solitary Dance by Salva Rubio and Efa

Just so you know how much of a rube I am: my first big takeaway from this book was that Degas is not an Impressionist, but aligned more with the traditionalist, academic painters of 19th century France in his style and working methods. Who knew!? (Well, probably everyone who cared, and millions more who had a better art-history education than I did.)

Degas and Cassatt: A Solitary Dance is the second book by creators Salva Rubio (writer) and (Ricard) Efa (artist and colorist) in a loose series about the Impressionists and their circle, after Monet: Itinerant of Light. I'm fairly confident that there isn't a third book lurking in the middle, untranslated - their other collaboration to date was a book on Django Reinhardt.

Degas and Cassatt somewhat follows the model of Monet: we begin at Degas's grave, with an aged Cassatt thinking through all of the criticisms of his personality and work - more personality than work, and a lot of those - and wondering if he ever found happiness. The book then flashes back to tell the story of Degas's working career, with a secondary focus on Cassatt's work. We don't get Cassatt's full story, and the focus is on their painting and relationship - this is a narrower, more specific book than Monet, which looked to encompass a whole life.

Degas, from the version presented here, was a stiff, unpleasant, demanding man - obsessed with painting "Frenchwomen" (often very young ones in ballet costumes) but also notably misogynist even for his day, and fanatically devoted to his work to the point of refusing most human contact. He was usually alone, by choice. He never married, and there are no plausible rumors of affairs with women - even with all the ballerinas and models he met. It's barely possible he was gay, but, if so, he was either entirely closeted or had a world-class discretion that left no trace at all of any connections. Really, the simple explanation is most likely: he had work, not people. He was a spiky, obnoxious man, whose few friends liked his company, in small doses, in spite of his massive faults - and, luckily for them, Degas disliked people so much that they only ever got small doses of him.

The secondary focus on Cassatt was a good choice here: it humanizes Degas, gives us a relatable and positive viewpoint on his life, and allows us to see him in context. Manet serves a similar role - as another demanding, hard-headed painter with strongly-held artistic views who argues with Degas - in the front half of the book, providing another point of comparison, this time to an artist who did indulge in women. (Too much so, since he died of syphilis at fifty-one.)

Rubio and Efa show some of Degas's famous work here, but they don't aim to recreate that work extensively in panels the way they did in Monet. (The effect was mostly lost on me in the earlier book, so I'll just note the difference.)

It's a wordy, thoughtful book that dives deeply into Degas's artistic impulses and driving passions, presented in mostly soft colors that somewhat mimic Degas's own work. It doesn't quite look like a Degas painting - says the man who has admitted several times he's no art expert - but it looks Degas-esque, as if it were the record of the world he saw and captured in his work. And Degas himself comes across about as understandable and positively as I can imagine possible, for such a self-obsessed, inherently solitary man.