Martin Gayford

Sex and the city | 23 November 2017

There are unusual views of London by Monet and Constable, while Degas celebrates the brothels of Paris

‘I should like,’ Edgar Degas once remarked, ‘to be famous and unknown.’ On the whole, he managed to achieve this. Degas is after all one of the greatest names in European art, but there is much about him that remains enigmatic. Some of his works seem secretive, even surreptitious — the extraordinary monotypes he made in Parisian brothels, for example, or the many wax sculptures he created but neither cast nor exhibited.

These and many other aspects of this curiously sympathetic man are explored in Degas: A Passion for Perfection by Jane Munro (Fitzwilliam Museum, £40), a fine book accompanying the current exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (until 14 January 2018) marking the centenary of his death.

One of Degas’ bons mots was that ‘there is a kind of success that is indistinguishable from panic’. Quite true: and perhaps these days there is more anxiety than ever in the ranks of the famous. At least one subject in Annie Leibovitz: Portraits 2005–2016 (Phaidon, £69.95), an anthology of the globally glamorous, has already fallen from the pantheon (Harvey Weinstein).

Leibovitz often approaches her subjects with a theatrical élan which is positively baroque (though fortunately not Weinstein). Thus George Clooney is on a set entirely staffed by young women wearing underclothes — and resembling so many nymphs in a picture by Poussin. There she does what painters once did: creates a stunning public image for the great and celebrated. Not surprisingly, given her preoccupation with old masters, living artists are among her most memorablemodels: Jasper Johns, David Hockney, Howard Hodgkin reclining in his studio, Jeff Koons working out, stark naked, in his private gym.

Of course it was Andy Warhol who claimed that in the future we would all attain fame for 15 minutes.

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