L’Absinthe remains one of Degas’s most celebrated works. It achieved a huge notoriety when it was exhibited in London in 1893, mainly because of the storm of controversy which it provoked in the press.
Opinions were sharply divided, and the debate raised fundamental issues about what was, and what was not, acceptable in painting. You can follow the story in the newspaper extracts reproduced here by clicking on the links on the left.
Charles W. Furse Westminster Gazette
18 March 1893
… no one has ever been so foolish as to try and eliminate ‘subject from painting’, or to object to the presence of a literary idea. They have merely said that it can never be the raison d’être of a picture … the recognition of this fact in no way interferes with the axiom that a picture must, in the first place, be a great painting … Mr. Richmond believes that no one who looks at M. Degas’s picture can be interested in its essential pictorial qualities!! Which recalls the sayings of the late Master of Trinity that a certain person had plenty of taste, and all of it bad. For it is difficult to understand the frame of mind of a man who has devoted 30 years or more to the study of art, and then, looking at L’Absinthe, is unconscious of those qualities of draughtsmanship, design, and colour with which the picture teems.
However, I can assure him that any genuine admirer of the picture finds in its delicacy of selection, the subtlety and research of its drawing, and its curious charm of composition, intellectual beauties as completely satisfying as a great symphony to a musician.
‘The New Art Criticism’ Westminster Gazette
20 March, 1893
Mr. Charles W. Furse, everyone knows, is an artist of great promise, and before he took the French poison he painted manly, and to my old-fashioned taste, admirable portraits … It is just because of those 40 years of the study of the best art of various schools that the galleries of Europe display, I do not confound good and not good painting. It is almost a truism to state the fact that none but the most highly-finished work in any of the three arts will bear the tests of time. Perfect craftsmanship, such as was Van Eyck’s, Holbein’s, Bellini’s, Michael Angelo’s, becomes more valuable as time goes on. Time adds to its value. The qualities admired by this new school are certainly the mirrors of that side of nineteenth century development most opposed to fine painting, or, sadly, fine craftsmanship. Hurry, rush, fashions, are the enemies of toil, patience, and seclusion, without which no great works are produced. Hence the admiration for an art fully answering to a demand. No doubt Impressionism is an expression in painting of the deplorable side of modern life.
It belongs to the interviewing, advertising, inquisitive evolution, and, therefore, its existence is regretted by serious artists, painters, writers, or musicians.
Mr. Furse compares the pleasures he and his friends derive from L’Absinthe as equal to those of a musician listening to a great ‘symphony’. The vault paintings of the Sistine chapel are like a great symphony. The very limited little picture under discussion is like a string quartette [sic].
Walter Crane Westminster Gazette
20 March, 1893
Here is a study of human degradation, male and female, presented with extraordinary insight and graphic skill, with all the devotion to the realisation (or idealisation) of squalid and sordid unloveliness, and the outward and visible signs of the corruption of society which are characteristic of the most modern painting. Such a study would not be without its value in a sociological museum, or even as an illustrated tract in the temperance propaganda; but when we are asked to believe that this is a new revelation of beauty – that this is the Adam and Eve of a new world of aesthetic pleasure, degraded and not ashamed, a paradise of un natural selection – it is another matter.
The best answer is, perhaps, another question – How could one live with such a work? That is a test which never fails.
Walter Sickert Westminster Gazette
20 March 1893
Much too much has been made of ‘drink’, and ‘lessons’, and ‘sodden’, and ‘boozing’ in relation to the picture by Degas.
I know the work of Degas very well, and his titles, and his reasons for them; and I will hazard the conjecture that l’Absinthe is not his title at all. I would wager, though I do not know, that he called the picture Un homme et une femme asis dans un café. This conjecture, whether by chance it be correct or not, is my criticism on the criticisms. I need not elaborate the importance of its bearing. If l’Absinthe be, by chance, his title, it is to be taken as having no further intention than such title as Rubens’s Chapeau de paille. But Degas measures the exact range of a word as carefully and as unerringly as he does that of a line or tone.
H. S. Westminster Gazette
24 March 1893
…D.S.M. seems to me sometimes narrow in his taste, but I feel bound to respect him for his attempt to show people that worthy commonplaces sweetened to suit the public taste is not art; and I believe that his advocacy of the purely painter’s qualities in a picture can do nothing but good.
‘The New Art Criticism’ Westminster Gazette
29 March 1893.
“You have asked me to answer a question. How could one live with such a work as Degas’s L’Absinthe? For so the picture has been named, but not by me … as a collector my tastes are wide. Corot, Matthew and James Maris, Rousseau, Troyon, Constable, Gainsborough, Degas, Rembrandt, Reynolds, are all attractive to me.Hobbema and Crome, De Hooghe, Ostade and Mieris, Frans Hals and Terburg, all are beloved by the owner of the picture someone has dubbed “L’Absinthe”. Yet I am misguided enough to consider Mr. Matthew Marris, Mr. Whistler, and M. Degas perhaps the greatest living painters in the world … I have lived with L’Absinthe for many months. It was hung in a position which enabled me to pass and see it constantly; every day I grew to like it better. At last after frequent requests to sell, and wearied by the questionings of those who were incapable of understanding it, I exchanged it in part payment for another picture. It had not been away for 48 hours before I went back to the dealer, and, in order to recover it, bought another work by Degas, La Répétition. L’Absinthe then went back into its former position. Such is the influence of Degas upon one who has studied the great Old Masters all his life.
Westminster Gazette,24 March 1893
I am glad…that neither the new art or the new criticism will be able to persuade English common sense that the last word of European 19th century art is to be found in a vulgar French representation of the habitués of a dram-shop.
W.A.S.B., Westminster Gazette, 24 March 1893
We are invited to a symphony, and behold, a coster song; admirable no doubt, in its way, and when a Chevalier (or Degas) is the singer, but by no manner of means symphonic … has told us in emphatic language that painting no longer bases its excellence on architecture with the arts of old, but is great by reason of ‘curiosity’.”
D.S.M. Spectator,25 March 1893
That the dignity of the performance does not depend on the dignity of the subject, but on that of him who treats it, is surely indisputable … a great artist, like Charles Keene, may use the drunkard freely as a subject in the pure spirit of fun…if only he legibly inscribes a written joke beneath the drawing. But the painter, the complexity of whose feeling, the gravity of whose spirit, the refinement of whose vision express themselves in their own language of painting, is denounced…the artist whose ‘finish’ is of that real kind…going beyond drawing but the very best, is described as the result of a hurried age; and the man who, of all the painters of our time, has most shunned the vulgarities of advertisement and publicity…is held up as the type of an interviewing society. It follows… that the critic, whose…office it is to avert public wrath from fine painting, is supposed, when he praises a picture in which Degas happens to treated a café scene, to wish either (1) that everyone should go a drink absinthe in cafés, or (2) that painters should paint nothing else. What is desirable is, that painters should treat whatever subject they take in hand with the same delicacy and sense of beauty…It is impossible to reveal to any one who has not an eye for the language of painting , where the pictorial element comes in. It is difficult, but perhaps not impossible, to convince him that there is a gap in the set of terms under which he looks at a picture, and that is just that part, which does not exist for him, that makes it picture. He is ready to allow that, for him, that makes it a picture. He is ready to allow that, besides the ‘Subject’, there is something called ‘Technique’; a picture is for him ‘Subject&Technique’…Technique is therefore a condition under which the painter sees things, but it is not a mechanical beauty stuck upon the surface of a picture and detachable from it. It is only bad technique that can only be so considered, the flashy trick that means nothing, or the mechanical smoothness and finish that means nothing. In the best painting the execution comes out of the … the very reverse is true of bad painting. It is all technique and bad observation … The Philistine of one age wishes to scratch his name on the paintings of the Sistine…The Philistine that follows likes Corot…and wishes to run his umbrella through Degas…he must be coerced once more, and in a year or two, Degas will be to him even as that other painter of the degraded subject, Rembrandt. For the battle was over ten years ago, and we witness a belated skirmish in an outlying parish of art.
G.M. Speaker, 25 March 1893
The tale is not a pleasant one, but it is a lesson...I plead guilty to the grave offence of having played to the gallery. The picture is a work of art, and therefore void of all ethical signification…In the abominable phrase…I admitted the monstrous contention that our virtues and vices originate not in our inherited natures, but are found in the books we read and the pictures we look upon….My description of Degas’s picture seemed to me a little unconventional, and to soothe the reader who is shocked by everything that lies outside his habitual thought, and to dodge the reader who is always on the watch to introduce a discussion on that sterile subject, ‘morality in art’, to make things pleasant for everybody…I told a little lie…I suggested that someone had preached, and straight away preaching began- Zola and the drink question from Mr. Richmond, sociology from Mr. Crane. The picture is merely a work of art, and has nothing to do with drink or sociology…Perhaps Mr. Walter Crane will feel inclined to apologise for his language when he learns that the man who sits tranquilly smoking his pipe is a portrait of the engraver Deboutin, a man of great talent and at least Mr. Walter Crane’s equal as a writer and as a designer. True Mr. Deboutin does not dress as well as Mr. Walter Crane, but there are many young men in Pall Mall who would consider Mr. Crane’s dress quite intolerable, yet they would hardly be justified in speaking of a portrait of Mr. Walter Crane as a study of human degradation…M. Deboutin has lived a very noble life, in no way inferior to Mr. Crane’; his life has been entirely devoted to art and literature; his etchings have been for many years the admiration of artistic Paris, and he has had a play in verse performed at the Théâtre Français…I have known M. Deboutin a great number of years, and a sober man does not exist…When, hypocritically, I said the picture was a lesson, I referred to the woman…Mr. Crane, Mr. Richmond, and others have jumped to the conclusion that M.Deboutin [and] the woman…are ‘boozing’ together. Nothing can be farther from the truth. Deboutin always came to the café alone…Deboutin is thinking of his dry-points; the woman is incapable of thought. But not because she is a drunkard…Women like her are to be found by the score in the brasseries of the Rue des Martyrs and those of the Rue Fonatine…In England this class of woman is constantly drunk, in France hardly ever; and the woman Degas has painted is typical of her class…And the interest of the subject, from Degas’s point of view, lies in this strange contrast – the man thinking of his drypoints, the woman thinking…of nothing at all…how the picture gains in meaning when the web of false melodrama that a couple of industrious spiders have woven about it is brushed aside!
