Free The Art Forger by B A Shapiro Page B

asymmetrical composition, which is how the vast majority of Degas’ paintings are balanced. I wish the sketch had more than just a few lines for a face.
    Could there be a sixth After the Bath ? It’s not unheard of to discover an original painting stuffed in someone’s attic hundreds of years after it was painted. Or, more likely, Degas may have planned to do a sixth but never did. I focus on finding more differences between the two women. In the painting in front of me, Françoise is sturdy and coarse-looking, as are almost all of Degas’ bathers, but his sketches of Not-Françoise depict a smaller and more delicate woman with a tiny waist. Although I can’t be sure as the face is only roughed in, the model in the sketches doesn’t appear to be as pretty as the model in the painting, so it’s possible Degas just replaced her with someone more attractive. But then, where are the sketches for the final Françoise?
    I study his drawings, study Bath, do it again. I go to my Degas book piles and find more of his bathers, all of whom are hefty, not a single waist among them. And as before, there are quite a few drawings and paintings of Simone and Jacqueline but no sign of Françoise.
    B OSTON’S M USEUM OF Fine Arts couldn’t be more different from the Gardner. From its grand entrances flanked by Corinthian columns to its ultramodern additions, there’s an overwhelming sense of brightness, openness, awe. Towering ceilings and wide sweeping spaces filled with both artificial and natural light flatter the artworks and allow the visitor to experience them to their fullest. There’s no clutter, lots of comfortable benches, and you’re allowed to use pens. Cameras even.
    The MFA owns over seventy Degas paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures. About a dozen works are oil on canvas, but only five of these are on display when I go over. The rest are on loan or in storage.
    My favorite of the five is At the Races in the Countryside. It’s a portrait of a young husband and wife sitting in a carriage with their infant and wet nurse under a luminous blue sky, which takes up the entire top half of the painting. A few tiny horses and tents are scattered in the far background, giving the image both depth and a cheerful attitude. Although considered part of his horseracing series, there’s barely any racing imagery in the painting. Degas was a well-known jokester, and I’m sure he was goofing on someone when he gave it its title.
    In contrast to the airy, bucolic feel of Races, the other four paintings—two portraits of Degas’ father, one of his sister and brother-in-law, and one of an aunt with her daughters—are all darkly painted with rich, emotional undertones of sadness and separateness. While he never married and rumor has it that he had few dates, either male or female, Degas was supposedly a very faithful and loving member of his large, extended family. Yet, looking at the grimness of these portraits, one has to wonder.
    But I’m not here to enjoy the paintings or to psychoanalyze Degas. I’m here to study Degas’ composition, his brushstrokes and painting techniques, his use of line, shadow, light, and movement. Although I have the original at home, my painting will be better if I immerse myself in as much Degas as I can.
    Three of the paintings are hung in the Impressionist Gallery, one in the Nineteenth-Century European Gallery, and the last in the rotunda connecting to Old Masters. The galleries are adjacent, and I walk from one painting to the next, then back around again, and then again. I want to get a sense of the five as a whole, as the work of a single master, before I start studying their details.
    As always, when I’m surrounded by Degas’ work, I’m filled with admiration for the man, with an overwhelming joy at being in this moment, in the presence of such greatness. A visual orgasm. I once heard an interview with a musician who said he didn’t get art museums, that they left him cold. He