A portrait of the artist as an anti-Semite

Linda Nochlin

Detail, Edgar Degas, ‘Portrait of Henri Michel-Lévy,’ 1878(Image: Calouste Gulbenkian Museum/Wikipedia)

At the time of the Dreyfus affair, many members of the artistic avant-garde took sides: Monet and Pissarro, with their old friend and supporter Zola, were Dreyfusard, or pro-Dreyfus, as were the younger radical artists Luce, Signac, and Vallotton and the American Mary Cassatt; Cézanne, Rodin, Renoir, and Degas were anti-Dreyfusard. Monet, who had been out of touch with Zola for several years, nevertheless wrote to his old friend two days after the appearance of “J’accuse” to congratulate him for his valor and his courage; on 18 January, Monet signed the so-called Manifesto of the Intellectuals on Dreyfus’ behalf. Despite the fact that at the outset of the affair many anarchists were unfavorably disposed toward Dreyfus—an army officer and wealthy to boot—Pissarro, who was an ardent anarchist, nevertheless quickly became convinced of his innocence. He too wrote to Zola after the appearance of “J’accuse,” to congratulate him for his “great courage” and “nobility of … character,” signing the letter, “Your old comrade.” Renoir, who managed to keep up with some of his Jewish friends like the Natansons at the height of the affair, nevertheless was both an anti­-Dreyfusard and openly anti-Semitic, a position obviously linked to his deep political conservatism and fear of anarchism. Of the Jews, he maintained that there was a reason for their being kicked out of every country, and asserted that “they shouldn’t be allowed to become so important in France.” He spoke out against his old friend Pissarro, saying that his sons had failed to do their military service because they lacked ties to their country. Earlier, in 1882, he had protested against showing his work with Pissarro, maintaining that “to exhibit with the Jew Pissarro means revolution.”

None of the former Impressionists, however, was as ardently anti-Dreyfusard and, it would seem, as anti-Semitic as Edgar Degas. When a model in Degas’ studio expressed doubt that Dreyfus was guilty, Degas screamed at her “you are Jewish … you are Jewish …” and ordered her to put on her clothes and leave, even though he was told that the woman was actually Protestant. Pissarro, who continued to admire Degas’ work, referred to him in a note to Lucien as “the ferocious anti-Semite.” He later told his friend Signac that since the anti-Semitic incidents of 1898, Degas, and Renoir as well, shunned him. Degas, at the height of the affair, even went so far as to suggest that Pissarro’s painting was ignoble; when reminded that he had once thought highly of his old friend’s work he replied, “Yes, but that was before the Dreyfus affair.”

Such anecdotes provide us with a bare indication of the facts concerning vanguard artists and the Dreyfus affair, and they tend to create an oversimplified impression of an extremely complex historical situation. Certainly, there seems to be little evidence in the art of any of these artists, of such essentially political attitudes as anti­-Semitism or Dreyfusard sympathies. Yet there are certain ways of reading the admittedly rather limited visual evidence that can lead to a more sophisticated analysis of the issues involved. Two concrete images reveal, better than any elaborate theoretical explanation, the complexity of the relation of vanguard artists to Jews and “Jewishness” and, at the same time, the equally complex relation which obtains between visual representation and meaning. The first, a work in pastel and tempera on paper of 1879, is by Edgar Degas, and it represents Ludovic Halévy, the artist’s boyhood friend and constant companion, writer, librettist, and man-about-town. Halévy is shown backstage at the opera with another close friend, Boulanger-Cavé. The image is a poignant one. The inwardness of mood and the isolation of the figure of Halévy, silhouetted against the vital brilliance of the yellowish blue-green backdrop, suggest an empathy between the middle-aged artist and his equally middle-aged subject, who leans, with a kind of resigned nonchalance, against his furled umbrella. The gaiety and make-believe of the theater setting only serves as a foil to set off the essential solitude, the sense of worldly weariness, established by Halévy’s figure. Halévy himself commented on this discrepancy between mood and setting in the pages of his journal: “Myself, serious in a frivolous place: That’s what Degas wanted to represent.” The only touch of bright color on the figures is provided by the tiny dab of red at both men’s lapels: the ribbon of the Legion of Honor, glowing like an ember in the dark, signifying with Degas’ customary laconicism the distinction appropriate to members of his intimate circle—though Degas himself viewed such institutional accolades rather coolly. Halévy, of course, was a Jew; a convert to Catholicism, to be sure, but a Jew, nevertheless, and when the time came, a staunch Dreyfusard. His son, Daniel, one of Degas’ most fervent admirers, was to be, with his friend Charles Peguy, one of the most fervent of Dreyfus’ defenders. No one looking at this sympathetic, indeed empathetic, portrait would surmise that Degas was (or would become) an anti-Semite or that he would become a virulent anti-Dreyfusard; indeed, that within 10 years, he would pay his last visit to the Halévys home, which had been like his own for many years, and never return again, except briefly, on Ludovic’s death in 1908, to pay his final respects.

Edgar Degas: ‘Ludovic Halevy et Albert Boulanger-Cavé dans les coulisses de l’Opéra,’ 1879 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris)

The second image to consider is a pen-and-ink drawing, one of a series of 28 by Camille Pissarro titled Les Turpitudes Sociales. Created in 1889, the series, representing both the exploiters and the exploited of his time was intended for the political education of his nieces Esther and Alice Isaacson. The drawing in question is titled “Capital” and represents, in a highly caricatural style, reminiscent of Daumier or the English graphic artist Charles Keene, the statue of a fat banker clutching a bag of gold to his heart. The features of the figure—the prominent hooked nose, protruding cars, thick lips, slack pot belly, soft hands, and knock-knees—could almost serve as an illustration for the description of the prototypical Jew concocted by the anti-Semitic agitator Drumont. In a letter accompanying Les Turpitudes Sociales, Pissarro describes this drawing as follows: “The statue is the golden calf, the God Capital. In a word it represents the divinity of the day in a portrait of a Bischoffheim [sic], of an Oppenheim, of a Rothschild, of a Gould, whatever. It is without distinction, vulgar and ugly.” Lest we think that this stereotypically Jewish caricature glossed by a list of specifically Jewish names is a mere coincidence, figures with the exaggeratedly hooked noses used to pillory Jews appear prominently in the foreground of another drawing from the series, “The Temple of the Golden Calf,” a representation of a crowd of speculators in front of the bourse. A third drawing, originally intended for the Turpitudes Sociales album but then omitted, is even more overtly anti­-Semitic in its choice of figure type. The drawing represents the golden calf being borne in procession by four top-hatted capitalists, the first two of whom arc shown with grotesquely exaggerated Jewish-looking features, while several long-­nosed attendants follow behind in the cortege. The whole scene is observed by a group of working­-class figures with awed expressions.

Camille Pissarro: ‘Les Turpitudes Sociales,’ 1890. (Südwest-Verlag, München/wikimedia)

It is hard for the modern viewer to connect these anti-Semitic drawings with what we know about Pissarro: the fact that he was, after all, a Jew himself; that he was an anarchist; that he was an extremely generous and unprejudiced person; and, above all, with the fact that when the time came he became a staunch supporter of Dreyfus and the Dreyfusard cause. Yet lest we reach the paradoxical conclusion that the anti-Dreyfusard Degas was more sympathetic to his Jewish subjects than the Jewish Dreyfusard Pissarro, one must examine further both the art and the attitudes of the two artists. What, for instance, are we to make of a Degas painting, almost contemporary with the Halévy portrait, titled “At the Bourse”? It represents the Jewish banker, speculator, and patron of the arts, Ernest May, on the steps of the stock exchange in company with a certain M. Bolatre. At first glance, the painting seems quite similar to the “Friends on the Stage”, even to the way Degas has used some brilliantly streaked paint on the dado to the left to set off the black-clad figures. But if we look further, we see that this is not quite the case. The gestures, the features, and the positioning of the figures suggest something quite different from the distinction and empathetic identification characteristic of the Halévy portrait: What they suggest is “Jewishness” in an unflattering, if relatively subtle way.
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If “At the Bourse” does not sink to the level of anti-Semitic caricature, like the drawings from Les Turpitudes Sociales, it nevertheless draws from the same polluted source of available visual stereotypes. Its subtlety owes something to the fact that it is conceived as “a work of art” rather than a “mere caricature.” It is not so much May’s Semitic features, but rather the gesture that I find disturbing—what might be called the “confidential touching”—that and the rather strange, close-up angle of vision from which the artist chose to record it, as though to suggest that the spectator is spying on rather than merely looking at the transaction taking place. At this point in Degas’ career, gesture and the vantage point from which gesture was recorded were everything in his creation of an accurate, seemingly unmediated, imagery of modern life. “A back should reveal temperament, age, and social position, a pair of hands should reveal the magistrate or the merchant, and a gesture should reveal an entire range of feelings,” the critic Edmond Duranty declared in the discussion of Degas from his polemical account of the nascent Impressionist group, “The New Painting” (1876). What is “revealed” here, perhaps unconsciously, through May’s gesture, as well as the unseemly, inelegant closeness of the two central figures and the demeanor of the vaguely adumbrated supporting cast of characters, like the odd couple, one with a “Semitic nose,” pressed as tightly as lovers into the narrow space at the left­-hand margin of the picture, is a whole mythology of Jewish financial conspiracy. That gesture—the half-hidden head tilted to afford greater intimacy, the plump white hand on the slightly raised shoulder, the stiff turn of May’s head, the somewhat emphasized ear picking up the tip—all this, in the context of the half-precise, half-merely adumbrated background, suggests “insider” information to which “they,” are privy, from which “we,” the spectators (understood to be gentile) are excluded. This is, in effect, the representation of a conspiracy. It is not too farfetched to think of the traditional gesture of Judas betraying Christ in this connection, except that here, both figures function to signify Judas; Christ, of course, is the French public, betrayed by Jewish financial machinations.

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