Impressionism in the Big Easy: A Meeting of Minds in New Orleans

The best of all possible worlds, contrary to any notions Leibniz or Voltaire might have had, was post-Civil War New Orleans. Not a mere metropolis, New Orleans was an emerging economic powerhouse ridden with racial tension, an elegant locus of brilliance of all sorts, and very nearly, if Christopher Benfey is to be believed, a living, breathing entity. The great painter Edgar Degas sojourned in this charmed city for several months in 1872 and 1873, and an enamored Benfey seized the coincidence as an opportunity to write a diffuse paean to the Crescent City and her denizens, and incidentally to Degas.

The result is a hagiography of sorts, but never a breathless one. A wealth of informative detail and an abundance of anecdote bolster even Benfey's boasts in his new book, Degas in New Orleans, a fascinating if flawed evocation of a grand moment in a magnificent city.

Although French, Degas had a substantial chunk of family in Louisiana. Ripe for a change of scenery, Degas eagerly agreed to accompany his brother Rene, newly established as a New Orleans cotton merchant, back to the New World in 1872. A transatlantic passage and a snaky voyage through the eastern United States dropped the Degas brothers at the New Orleans train station, where Edgar Degas met his cousins, the Mussons, for the first time, Rene, who had married a Musson daughter, had warned the family to expect a "g-r-r-r-eat artist," but Degas was cousin first and artist afterward to the Mussons. Their warm acceptance gave him the freedom of painting intimate family portraits or of using the house as a base to explore the other lures of the city exactly as he chose.

New Orleans, fondly described by Benfey, did indeed attract Degas. A seething maelstrom beneath its exquisite veneer of refinement, the city threatened to be torn apart by racial conflict during Degas' stay. Some of his prominent relatives belonged to a league designed to facilitate business ties between whites and free men of color; others belonged to a white supremacist league. (As this book reveals for the first time, Degas had some relatives among those free men of color.) Not just the Musson family but all of New Orleans was similarly split. Lingering bitterness against Reconstruction was easily detectable, as was the frantic energy of the cotton brokers in the Musson family firm. Degas was captivated even by the colorful strangers engrossed in their quotidian promenade near the Musson house.

George Washington Cable and Kate Chopin, literary figures destined to win fame for tales they would set in Louisiana, both lived in this New Orleans. Benfey frequently summarizes their work or utilizes their personal experiences to highlight some facet of life in the city, as suggested by his book's subtitle, "Encounters in the Creole World of Kate Chopin and George Washington Cable." A host of other characters parade through the book as well; in aristocratic Creole New Orleans three or even two degrees of separation applied. Benfey delves into this byzantine web of relationships with zest, retrieving kernels of enthralling although often irrelevant fact. In his introduction, he mentions that as he wrote the book he had to force characters he "had once chosen for starring roles" to recede from the forefront of his tale, but these characters remain burgeoning starlets.

Benfey often dives so deep into such detail that the reappearance of Degas is a jolt: Degas, again? The cogent explanations of Degas' paintings interspersed through the text transcend this discontinuity. New Criticism be damned, Benfey glories in tying the fiction of Cable and Chopin and the art of Degas to their personal lives. Whether connecting Degas' cousins to various figures in his paintings or noting how Degas' artistic preoccupation with the unfamiliar presence of African-Americans seeped into his work, Benfey perceptively joins life and art.

Degas' painting underwent a radical shift during his time in New Orleans; unfortunately, the reproductions of his paintings in the book make that shift less clear. Benfey highlights a pair of paintings to illustrate the change, the photographically realistic A Cotton Office in New Orleans and the much blurrier, Impressionistic Cotton Merchants in New Orleans. Office, as the frontispiece, is the only painting in the book to be reproduced in color. Merchants (visible in full color at the Fogg), like the other well-chosen and well-placed illustrations, is only a small black-and-white reproduction. The loss of color is lamentable--Dancers, Pink and Green loses its panache in gray--but the lack of clarity in the reproductions is more worrisome. Benfey often refers to minute details, such as an arm painted over but still visible, but even much squinting may fail to reveal the detail in the reproduction.

A few stylistic quirks similarly mar otherwise breezy and enjoyable prose. Benfey has a tendency to hammer metaphor into oblivion. A similar tautological impulse marks his usage of apt and striking details. The New England ice shipped to New Orleans for use as refrigeration is mentioned prominently three times in fewer chapters. And phrases like "we will have more to say in coming chapters" are irritatingly common, tantalizing us as Benfey rambles down some other tangential avenue.

But perhaps such blatant forecasts are necessary for the coagulation of such a massive amount of information. Degas in New Orleans is nearly incomprehensible in the first few chapters; a bewildering array of characters with similar names but little in common except Louisiana are rapidly introduced. Slowly, as the book unfurls, far-flung strands converge, and the book's odd structure eventually makes sense.

If retrospect illuminates the book's design, it obscures its ostensible subject. "This is a Degas we do not know well," Benfey notes of the not yet very famous man who stayed with the Mussons, and Benfey does not help us know this Degas any better. What Benfey instead introduces with his dense detail is a city peculiarly conducive to creativity. By turns menacing and nurturing, the New Orleans of the 1870s lurks behind every knotty relationship and every political machination of Degas' relatives, behind every story of Chopin's or Cable's and behind many of Degas' works.