FOREST IN THE MOUNTAINS (Forêt dans la montagne): Edgar Degas, ca. 1890, monotype in oil on paper, 11¾ x 15¾ inches. (Museum of Modern Art, New York, Louise Reinhardt Smith Bequest)

Degas was another wonder painter. I’ve never seen a bad Degas. — Ernest Hemingway

Thanks to a press pass that permitted me into “A Strange New Beauty: Edgar Degas” ahead of the paying public, I had the exhibit galleries more or less to myself for one precious, quietly hallucinatory hour. What follows should be about what I saw during a Sunday morning early opening at the Museum of Modern Art. But when the task of commenting on monotypes by Degas (1834-1917) coincides with the death of Muhammad Ali (1942-2016), all bets are off. If you were hitchhiking abroad in the 60s and the people picking you up heard where you were from, they would respond in elemental terms, such as “America good! Kennedy good!” After Kennedy had been assassinated and Johnson was in office, it was “America no good!” And it got worse, with Vietnam, the killings of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, and the rise of Nixon. Except that by then, there was Ali, and whether you were in Cairo or Kabul, Paris or Tehran, you would hear “America good! Ali! Ali! The Greatest!”

Having seen what happened or didn’t happen in May 1965 at Lewiston, Maine, the phantom knockout, Liston on his back, Ali dancing, you began to realize here was someone in possession of a gift, another sort of “strange new beauty,” that transcended sports. So here I am, with notes on Degas scribbled at MoMA, Ali dead, and the November election looming like literature’s great white whale, with the news just in from Smithsonian online that there are whales alive today who were born before Melville wrote Moby Dick.

Think about it. Certain bowhead whales in the waters off Alaska are over 200 years old. If that’s the “true gen,” as Ernest Hemingway liked to say, it beats even Ali, even Degas, at least until I think back on what I saw on that altogether unusual Sunday morning.

Enter Mr. Hemingway

Hemingway, who had a passion for both boxing and art, put it well: Degas was “a wonder painter.” The other “wonder painter” he mentioned in the same breath with Degas was “Mr. Paul Cézanne,” according to Lillian Ross in her famous New Yorker profile, “How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?” The comments came during a visit to the Impressionist galleries at the Met, with Ms. Ross, Hemingway’s wife Mary, and Patrick, his son from his second marriage. The Papa-unbound commentary, delivered while taking slugs from a hip flask, is, to quote Mr. John Keats, “a joy forever.” Although it was Cézanne who taught him most (“I learned how to make a landscape from Mr. Paul Cézanne by walking through the Luxembourg Museum a thousand times with an empty gut”), he thought enough of Degas to put him in the novel he was delivering to Scribners at the time of his visit to the Met. In Across the River and Into the Trees, when the Colonel looks out the window, he sees the Grand Canal “as grey as though Degas had painted it on one of his greyest days.”

Since I find myself, in effect, viewing “A Strange New Beauty” in the company of Hemingway with the news of Ali’s passing still fresh, Papa would be telling me Degas was the sort of fighter who kept on his toes and never let them hit him solid.

But if Hemingway really had been on the hushed sixth floor of MoMA with me the other morning, he’d have been whispering. There’s such a depth of silence in the nearly empty gallery, I seem to hear the creaking of the floorboards in Degas’s studio, which was also his dressing room, much to the consternation of his friends. Told he should keep his art apart from his clothes, he said he liked it that way, it’s more convenient when you’re living “the life of a worker.” Yep, that’s him moving about, creak-creak, Hemingway hears it too, we can even hear the rustle of his housemaid’s skirts, and the ghostly incoherent exclamations of a visitor, probably Edmund de Goncourt, who called Degas “a ventriloquist in paint,” because of the way he brings “laundress after laundress” to life, speaking their language, demonstrating how they go about their business, “the downward way of pressing, the circular way of pressing.”

Degas and Women

“Degas knew women,” Hemingway tells me. “All shapes and ages and sizes. That’s bunk about him hating them. Goncourt’s on the money when he says no one else came as close to painting the soul of the world. You want to know how he made all these monotypes? Think about the laundresses he painted, scrubbing, rinsing, wringing, smoothing, folding, then picture Degas rubbing with a rag on an ink-slimed plate, creating textures and half-tones with both hands, using his fingertips, adding or wiping away ink and then pressing it to the paper before it dries, all of a sudden it’s like being knocked down ten seconds before the bell, you don’t know how it’s going to look when you put the paper in the press, ‘a terrifying moment,’ says Mr. Degas. How will it come out? Looking like life or like death?

Hemingway has obvious issues with the curator’s wall text quoting J. K. Huysmans’s claim that Degas regarded women with “an attentive cruelty, a patient hatred.” Wrapping his arm around my shoulder, he hauls me over to The Star, a radiant pastel of a ballerina in ecstasy. “A woman hater made this?” he says, far from whispering now. “Look at the light on her face! Like any other fool in his 20s, Mr. Degas dreamed of having a nice little wife, simple, quiet, who understood his follies, someone he could spend his working life with. By the time he’s in his 30s he knows it’s a fantasy, he’s asking himself, ‘What would I want a wife for?’ Imagine having someone around who at the end of a hard day in the studio says, ‘That’s a nice painting, dear’? The one woman he could have married was another painter, his American friend Mary Cassatt, who was taller than he was, had a beautiful back, and spoke French with a terrible accent.”

Still hugging me close with one big sweaty arm, he drags us to the pastels on monotype and oils of nudes in the last room, most of them in awkward everyday poses, getting in and out of the tub, drying themselves. “Who says he’s looking for beauty? For Mr. Degas, all beautiful women had, this is what he said, ‘that touch of ugliness without which there is no salvation.’ He saw his nudes as keyhole art, showing them, like ‘animals cleaning themselves’ And he knew that if the ladies did like his stuff, it would be the end of him.”

Mallarmé and Debussy

It’s getting near the time when the 10:30 crowds will hit the galleries, but Hemingway’s not worried. He’s gazing at Degas’s photograph of a seated Auguste Renoir and a standing Stéphane Mallarmé, whose memorial to the “delicate lines and movements exquisite or grotesque” and “strange new beauty” of Degas’s late monotypes gave the MoMA curators a title. “Sylvia had this photo on the wall at Shakespeare and Company,” Hemingway says. “I like the looks of Mr. Mallarmé. Handsome devil, looks about my age, takes good care of himself, standing there with one hand in his jacket pocket. Christ, you’d think he was a well-read, well-fed banker. He’s 30 years past the Afternoon of a Faun. At first he didn’t like it that Debussy was setting his most famous poem to music, but after the premiere, he called it a marvel. Debussy had a passion for Degas’s landscape monotypes, these over here must be the same ones he saw in the 1890s. Debussy would do the same thing in music. Both 20 years ahead of their time. Seeing ahead to the abstract. Look at this one!”

A Wonder Landscape

We were standing in front of Forest in the Mountains, one of the strangest pieces in the show. “A knock out in the first round!” Hemingway is now definitely no longer whispering. “You don’t let the landscape beat you. You come right at it and drop a green dream when the crowd wants shades of brown. See the color of the sky? That’s close to the Degas grey the Colonel sees in Venice. You know Debussy saw this. Stood eye to eye with it like us. Then he put it to music. Maybe in one of the Arabesques. Or the thing he wrote for the woman he ran away to Jersey with. The ‘Isle Joyeuse.’ It’s the nature of the monotype. It’s all about momentum. You go and go and go. Like that big green island out of nowhere. Like a fallen forest. It’s the force of art. It comes right at you, you’re on the ropes, put your gloves over your eyes, ride it out. Or dance around it. Like Ali! When I was a kid, I played the cello, did you know? I could read music, Debussy, Ravel. Wish I’d been there to see Ali hammer Foreman and Frazier. It’s no good from the other side. Shabby reception. No HD. It’s 10:30. Here comes the crowd. Time to make my exit. New York’s not my town. You come here for a short time. Then back to Paris. Or Venice. Key West is good. Best is old Havana. I’ve got 52 cats and 16 dogs at the Finca. You want the true gen? Like I told Lillian: Never lead against a hitter unless you can outhit him. Crowd a boxer, and take everything he has, to get inside. Duck a swing. Block a hook. And counter a jab with everything you own.”

Curated by Jodi Hauptman (Princeton ’86), “A Strange New Beauty: Edgar Degas” will be on view on the Museum of Modern Art through Sunday, July 24. I’ve consulted Werner Hoffman’s Degas: A Dialogue of Difference; Degas: A Critical Study of the Monotypes, edited by Eugenia Parry Janis; The Private Lives of the Impressionists by Sue Roe; Debussy Studies by Robert Langham Smith; and Lillian Ross’s Reporting Always; Writings from The New Yorker.