DEGAS IN BLACK AND WHITE

...Perhaps the unyielding and slippery surfaces of the plates deprived his line of its usual piquancy and firmness, and forced him into simplifications he would not ordinarily have made...

...Most are in black-and-white, with color being reserved for infrequent landscapes...

...It is understandable that he should make scholars nervous and circumspect...

...Nor, it would appear, was his temperament, which led him to view life in subtle contrasts, suited to black-and-white in the way that, say, Goya's was...

...Her legs are two massive columns of soft, rich black, their contours and a shoulder reduced to gray, with touches of white light hitting to the top of her buttocks and the towel...

...In fact, Degas has come down as the least lovable (and thus the most interesting) of the Impressionists...

...It is possible, indeed, that Degas turned to prints much as Matisse turned to sculpture, for refreshment...

...On Art DEGAS IN BLACK AND WHITE BY VIVIEN RAYNOR Degas: The Complete Etchings, Lithographs and Monotypes (Viking, 272 pp., $32.50) is the first such collection of the artist's graphic work in either published or exhibited form...

...John Rewald (still the most readable and informative authority in the field) has noted that it was hard to tell where in Degas' discourse irony ended and sincerity began...

...Considering our century's tastes, Van Gogh's was the luckier choice...

...He said he wanted to be "illustrious and unknown,' and that continues to be his fate, in spite of modern biographical technology...

...On top of all this, he was, according to a contemporary who had been irked by the artist's intransigence over something, almost always right in his assessment of people and events...

...Dating from the mid-'70s to the early '90s, they comprise about two-thirds of Degas' total output of 321 pieces...

...I sometimes wonder if his stance was not partly a reaction against the writers and artists who so vociferously supported the Colonel...

...Due to its very chancey nature, the medium does not attract craftsmen pure and simple...

...Monotype" is an important-sounding term for a straightforward process that demands no great technical skill...

...This is not to say that Degas tackled his plates like an au-tointoxicated action painter...

...A man who could perceive the burgeoning genius of Gauguin and buy his work, he could also espouse second-rate painters like Raffaelli, if, according to Rewald, he felt they were struggling with important problems...

...Despite its promise of freedom, monotyping tends to have a depersonalizing effect on all of its practitioners...

...However informative the writers are-and both Adhemar and Cachin deal helpfully with chronology and technique-they invariably handle their subject gingerly," with forceps so to speak...

...This book, the fruit of the undertaking, appeared in Paris two years ago...

...The English edition is a handsome, somber-looking volume, well worth its forbidding price if only for the order it imposes on Degas' 64 etchings and lithographs...

...Contemporaneous with the pastels of the same subject, these prints are much looser in technique yet far more dramatic: Sweet melancholy has given way to an atmosphere that wavers between boredom and tragedy...

...One of the finest is of a woman seen from the rear, bending over to dry her feet...

...As the word indicates, monotyping is not, strictly speaking, a method of reproduction, since the pulling of the first proof removes most of the image...

...Its pleasures are akin to those of automatic drawing, in that there is a sense of being removed from the result, of being freed from the burden of making decisions...

...As striking is the heavy, classical figure in a tub, scrubbing her leg-a dark satiny work streaked with white...

...Many are quite beautiful, especially the larger black studies of women at their toilets...

...It is merely what happens when paper is applied to a design done, preferably in suitably thinned printer's ink or oil paint, on a metal or glass plate-almost any smooth ground will do...

...Ultimately, in presenting an unfamiliar and, in a way, uncertain Degas, Adhemar and Cachin's book is both disappointing and fascinating...

...The main attraction, however, is the monotypes...

...Though he liked to experiment with different mediums-and was obliged to do so because of his poor eyesight-Degas was not, I think, psychologically attuned to the ritual around printmaking...

...Identified with a movement that pursued plein-air immediacy, he feigned distaste and retired to his studio to contrive spontaneity there...

...Certainly a man who neither married nor, apparently, had any sexual liaisons with women of his own class is never going to get a fair trial in our "hyperenlightened" age, particularly since he spent most of his life recording the female...

...The artist concentrated fiercely on masses of black, gray and white, using little or no descriptive texture...

...Ever since the artist's family destroyed some they thought obscene, the works have been the objects of much speculation and curiosity, although they have existed more or less in oblivion...

...The most troubling aspect of the monotypes is the way they reopen the question of what kind of person Degas was...

...In any case, while a number of the impressions display naked prostitutes in their houses, with and without customers, they are most remarkable today for being hardly recognizable as the work of Degas...

...The historian R. H. Wilenski reported, with a completely straight face, that Degas had his housekeeper read anti-Semitic articles aloud "to give him an appetite for his tasteless food...

...Neither did Degas help matters by being cantankerous, acutely sensitive to the pretentiousness of others and intolerably witty at their expense...

...Contemporary biographers, Cachin among them, have implied that the prints were too intimate and voyeuristic for their time, but this assumes the present era to be less hypocritical than the 19th century rather than only less efficiendy organized in its mores...

...It was also to have been the first book by Paul Moses, a black professor at the University of Chicago, but he was murdered in that city in 1966, at the age of 36, by a pair of white youths...

...Becoming impatient, one eventually feels like settling for Pis-sarro's evaluation of Degas: "A terrible man," he said, "but frank and loyal...

...To be a hero, an artist must project a little corniness-a truth Van Gogh was closing in on when he observed: "I am thinking of accepting my role as a madman, just as Degas has taken on the appearance of a notary...

...Except for the 1968 show of monotypes mounted by the Fogg Museum, with its catalogue by Eugenia Parry Janis, Adhemar and Cachin's book is an unprecedented opportunity for Americans to see these atypical productions of Degas...

...Degas himself rarely exhibited them, or showed them even to his friends, for reasons that can only be conjectured...

...Although Degas seldom reminds one of other artists, there are treatments here that recall Masaccio, Goya, Renoir, and, in one instance, Henry Moore during his air-raid shelter period...

...No artist has revealed more compassion in his oeuvre, or more truth about humanity, yet Degas was neurasthenic and, at times, tiresomely perverse-notably when confronted by what he saw as mob thinking...

...Ranging from Lautrec-like cartoons of plump females on beds to monumental compositions in which the chiaroscuro has been scraped away to reveal nudes standing, reclining and washing themselves, they lack his characteristic tension-the feeling of figures having been dropped into spaces prepared for them-and the dignity he saw in each of his models regardless of their social position...

...This surely is but the final repetition of one of Degas' own more macabre wisecracks...

...Two French scholars, Jean Adhemar, chief curator of the Cabinet des Estampes at the Bibliotheque Na-tionale, and Francoise Cachin, curator of the Musee National d'Art Modeme, then took over the project...

...That Degas was conspicuously wrong in the Dreyfuss Affair has done much to inhibit his biographers...

...Surrounded by nature addicts, he came out against flowers and landscape...

...He might have fared better if he had produced overstuffed milkmaids a la Renoir, but he saw the appearance and gestures of women as an extension of their characters, and he rendered them with unique seriousness...

...Pawing through contemporary dissertations on the painter is a disheartening business...

...Still, several of his efforts do have a quality that suggests uneasy improvisation...