The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Edgar Degas · also titled Dans un café · an oil painting on canvas, upright, about 92 by 68.5 cm · two figures side by side on a banquette in a Paris café, against a mirror, behind the empty tops of marble tables · painted 1875 to 1876 · Musée d’Orsay, Paris · the single canvas, scored as it stands
Mode
A genre scene of the modern city stripped of its story and its moral; the figure picture as placement, seen from a neighbouring table
Mythos
The couple turned inside out, a man and a woman who do not touch; the woman with the glass as a figure of urban solitude, evoked by the subject more than built
Phase
Painted 1875 to 1876, in the years of the Impressionist exhibitions and the painting of modern life; now in the Musée d’Orsay, Paris
Presentation
One upright canvas, about 92 by 68.5 cm, the figures in the upper right, the lower left given over to empty table tops
Register
Cold and muted: greys, ochres, dull whites and browns, the pale dress and the cloudy glass the only light notes, held at one low pitch
Scale
Two people, one room, one hour, one relation
Governing Proposition
A woman in a pale dress sits on a café banquette with a glass of absinthe before her, her eyes down; beside her a man in a broad hat, a pipe in his mouth, looks out of the picture and is cut by its edge. Between them and the viewer lie the grey tops of empty tables. The wager of the canvas is that a figure picture can say what it knows by where it puts its figures: that company is not communion, and that a woman alone with a glass in a public room stands outside the protections of her class, stated without a story, a fall or a moral, and seen as if from the next table.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Edgar Degas painted the canvas in 1875 and 1876. It goes by two titles, L’Absinthe and Dans un café, and both are its own. It is an upright, about 92 by 68.5 cm, in oil, and it hangs in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. The work scored here is that one canvas, as it stands.
Two figures sit side by side on a banquette against a mirror. At the left is a woman in a pale dress and a small hat, with a glass of absinthe on the table before her. At the right is a man in a broad hat with a pipe, cut by the right edge of the canvas. The models were known people: the actress Ellen Andrée and the engraver Marcellin Desboutin. The picture does not make them anyone else. It puts two working artists of the city at a café table and leaves them there.
The subject had been painted before. Manet’s Absinthe Drinker of 1859, refused at the Salon, had already set a drinker of absinthe in a picture, and Degas in the same years was painting the theatre, the races and the dancers. This canvas belongs among his café pictures of the 1870s, and is the one in which the café is most nearly the whole of the meaning.
Movement II
The composition is unusual for a picture of two people. The figures and the mirror take up roughly the upper right half of the field. The lower left is given over almost wholly to the grey tops of empty marble tables and the gaps between them, laid in a zigzag that runs from the lower left toward the couple. The man is cut by the right edge. The view is low and to one side, like a glance from a neighbouring table, and it owes something to the Japanese print and to the photograph.
The tables are not empty space. They are the distance the picture is about. They lead the eye in, along the zigzag, and they keep it off: the viewer is placed at a table of the same café, close enough to see and not close enough to join. They push the couple up and right into the corner where they sit. The mirror behind does the same from the other side, doubling the two heads as blurred shadows and closing the room. The two are walled before and behind.
Every part bears load, and the few that bear less are small. The newspaper on its stick and the objects on the near table serve the café’s truth and anchor the zigzag more than they carry meaning; a little of the floor at the lower edge reads as reach. Substitute a centred, frontal arrangement, the two facing the viewer across a table, and the picture would lose almost everything it knows. Here isolation is not a theme laid over the composition. It is the composition.
Movement III
Neither figure looks at the other or at the viewer. The woman’s gaze is down and forward; her shoulders are slumped, her feet splayed. The man’s head is turned out of the picture to the right, the pipe in his mouth. Between them on the banquette is a small space. They sit side by side and are not together, and the inch between them is the most exact statement in the canvas.
What the picture brings into the open can be put in words. Company is not communion. A city’s public rooms are where its solitude is spent. A woman alone with a glass in a café stands outside the protections of her class. The genre painting of the century would have told a story about her, a fall and its consequence, and drawn a warning from it. This canvas refuses the story and the warning, and so shows the condition without the comfort of judgment. That is why it can be read both as a moral document and as painting: it gives each reading its evidence.
The woman’s inner life is closed by design. The picture stops at the threshold of her, where a novelist would go on. That is part of its truth, since what is shown is a person seen from outside in a public room; it is also the limit of its disclosure, which is one condition, sharply put. The couple who do not touch evoke the oldest image of the couple turned inside out, and the woman with the glass has since become a figure of urban solitude in general. The canvas builds the isolation; the myth it summons.
Movement IV
The palette is greys, ochres, dull whites and browns, with no saturated colour of any extent. The lightest notes are the pale dress and the cloudy glass, and the glass is the one point of luminous colour in the field. It is the title and the woman’s whole occupation. Every other note is dulled, and the dulling is the hour.
The making is exact. The woman’s slack posture and her feet are drawn with command; the man’s head is set in profile under the hat; the mirror’s doubling is soft; the marble tops are laid in thin greys that read as stone and as void together. The range is narrow and held without going dead. The empty lower left is deliberately thin, which is right for the picture, and it leaves much of the canvas doing structural rather than painterly work. Its handling is strong, and less virtuosic across the whole field than in the most commanding canvases on the desk.
The elevation is of one cold kind: the desolation in her face, the stillness of a room in which nothing will happen. It rises once, in the face and the glass, and is pitched low. The canvas refuses transport as it refuses the moral. Its force is in exactness. One law governs everything in it, that each thing is placed and coloured as separation, from the bare table at the lower left to the man’s cropped profile at the right; and the law holds over a small span, one room, one hour, one relation.
Movement V
The turn the canvas made is real: a figure picture with its figures in the corner and its foreground empty, a genre subject with its story taken out. The off-centre view risked reading as a mistake and the drab subject as ugliness. The turn was shared, in the same years, with Manet and Caillebotte, and Degas had already made the cropped, decentred view his own in the theatre and race pictures; this canvas is a decisive instance of it, not the first wager.
Its reach is named in particular works: Toulouse-Lautrec’s café and bar pictures, Picasso’s absinthe drinkers of 1901 to 1902, Sickert’s café and music hall interiors, and Hopper’s figures alone at café and automat tables. Much of that reach belongs to the café as a subject and to Degas’s method as a whole. Study has kept returning to the picture, on its sources, its models, the woman alone in public, the social history of drink and Degas’s coldness, and each return finds something in the canvas itself. After about a century and a half the canvas is whole and legible, in a national collection, and among the most reproduced images of its decade.
The desk sets it a tenth below Degas’s Little Dancer Aged Fourteen at 8.3, whose wager in wax, real hair and cloth was the larger; level with Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul at 8.2, a woman alone in a bar and a couple isolated in public rooms; a tenth below Hopper’s Nighthawks at 8.3, which builds its lit room in the dark city into a myth where this canvas builds a placement; below Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère at 8.7, which takes the same public solitude and the same mirror into a larger and stranger structure; and above Toulouse-Lautrec’s At the Moulin Rouge at 7.9, its descendant. The two sit on their banquette in the upper corner, side by side, the glass before her, the man half out of the frame of her evening.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test, part by part. The empty tables cannot go: they are the distance the picture is about, and they push the couple up and right into the corner where they sit. The mirror cannot go: it doubles the two heads as blurred shadows and closes the room behind them, so that they are walled before and behind. The glass cannot go: it is the title and the woman’s whole occupation. The man’s cropping cannot go: it makes him turned away, half outside her evening. What could be lost is small: the newspaper on its stick and the objects on the near table serve the café’s truth and anchor the zigzag more than they carry meaning, and a little of the floor at the lower edge reads as reach. The economy is strict, and it is the economy of a small subject.
Score: 8.5 / 10
What the canvas brings into the open is a condition that can be stated: two people side by side, in public, each wholly alone, and a city whose public rooms are where that solitude is spent. It is articulated, not a mood. The woman’s slumped shoulders, splayed feet and fixed downward gaze, the man’s turned head and pipe, and the inch of banquette between them say that company and communion are not the same, and that a woman alone with a glass in a café stands outside the protections of her class. The picture refuses the moralising genre scene, with no fall and no consequence, and so shows the condition without the comfort of judgment. Held just below the gate: the disclosure is one condition, sharply put, and the woman’s inner life is closed by design.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The axis is indifferent to warm or cold, and the canvas has a cold height of one kind: the desolation in the woman’s face, the dull light, the stillness of a room in which nothing will happen. It rises once, in her face and the glass before her, and does not rise again. What holds the axis low is the register the work chooses. It is muted and held, deliberately flattened, with no transport and no terror, and its force lies in exactness, not in elevation. The dread is real, and it is pitched low. Elevation is not what the canvas is for, and the axis records that plainly.
Score: 7.2 / 10
The particular is very particular: two named sitters, a café of the city, a real drink. It acquires archetypal standing in part. The woman with the glass has become a figure of modern dissipation and urban solitude in general, and a man and a woman side by side who do not touch evoke the oldest image of the couple, turned inside out. But the archetype is summoned by the subject, and by the picture’s later fame, more than built into the structure. What the composition builds is isolation, which is a condition and not a myth; no deep pattern bears load as a descent bears load in a great tragedy. Myth evoked, not built.
Score: 7.4 / 10
The inheritance is the genre scene, which tells a story and draws a moral, and the figure picture, which puts its figures at the centre. The turn: the figures pushed into the upper right corner, the man cut by the edge, the foreground given to empty furniture, and a viewpoint like a glance from a neighbouring table, owing something to the Japanese print and to the photograph; the genre subject stripped of its narrative and its moral. The stake was real: the off-centre composition risked reading as a mistake, and the drab subject as ugliness. Held at the bar and not above it because the turn belongs to a campaign shared with Manet and Caillebotte in the same years, and Degas had already made the cropped, decentred view his own in the theatre and race pictures.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Substitute a centred, frontal composition, the two at a table facing the viewer, and the picture loses almost everything it knows: the distance, the corner, the sense of a glance one should not be making, the man half out of the woman’s world. The zigzag of tables is access and barrier at once, leading the eye in and keeping it off. The mirror’s blur turns the reflected heads into shadows and the room into a closed box. The palette, every note dulled, is the hour. Form here is the instrument, not the container: isolation is shown as placement. Held below the top because the form serves one relation rather than founding a whole way of seeing.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Evidence over promise, at about a century and a half. It is read as a moral document and as a painting, and study has kept returning: to its composition and its Japanese and photographic sources; to the models, an actress and an engraver, and their standing; to gender and the woman alone in public; to alcohol and the social history of the café; to Degas’s realism and his coldness. Each return finds something in the picture itself, the gap on the banquette, the empty tables, the turned man. Held where it is because the questions are fewer than for the largest canvases of the period, and the image is more easily exhausted as a single statement.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Intrinsic force: the canvas fixes the café picture of modern solitude as a type, with the decentred, cropped view as its form, and joins the genre scene to the new painting of modern life without a moral. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Toulouse-Lautrec’s café and bar pictures; Picasso’s absinthe drinkers of 1901 to 1902; Sickert’s café and music hall interiors; Hopper’s figures alone at café and automat tables, which continue its arrangement. That is real reach, named in particular works. The discount is that much of it belongs to the café as a subject and to Degas’s whole decentred method, of which this canvas is one strong instance rather than the source, and so the axis stops just below the gate.
Score: 8.4 / 10
About a century and a half, weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: whole and legible; no loss of figure or field is known, and the composition reads as it was made. Presence: long and continuous, in a national collection in Paris, now in the principal galleries of the Musée d’Orsay, and the canvas is among the most reproduced images of its decade. Presence earns a tenth at most, and it is wide here without being of the very widest kind. Fabric is not charged. Its surface is known chiefly from reproduction, and that keeps the axis from the highest mark at its age, while form and presence carry it well above the gate.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Command of oil is high and load-bearing. The drawing of the woman’s slack posture and her feet; the man’s head in profile under the hat; the cloudy glass, the one point of luminous colour; the soft doubling in the mirror; the marble tops laid in thin greys that read as stone and as void together. The palette is held to a narrow, exact range without going dead: drabness here is exactness. Judged against the desk’s highest anchors, the handling is less virtuosic across the whole field. The empty lower left is deliberately thin, which is right for the picture, and it leaves much of the canvas doing structural rather than painterly work.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the bare table at the lower left and the man’s cropped profile at the right edge. They obey one law, that everything is placed and coloured as separation; each is an edge of the woman’s solitude, one before her and one beside her. The mirror closes the room behind on the same law, and the dulled palette keeps it in the colour. Nothing in the canvas contradicts it. Held where it is because narrowness is not coherence: the range covered is one room, one hour, one relation and one register, and a coherence that is complete is complete here over a small span.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The orders held: consciousness, in her absence and his turning away; the couple; the city and its public rooms; class and the working artist, an actress and an engraver as the sitters; the social fact of drink and of a woman alone in public. They are integrated in one arrangement rather than listed: the gap on the banquette carries the couple, the class and the city at once. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what a small canvas of two figures cannot reach: no family, no labour as such, no state, no sacred order, no natural order. The form caps the figure honestly, and the mark describes the form.
Score: 6.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.1, then The Living Form and The Made at 8.7, then The Inevitable and The Swerve at 8.5. A canvas whole and legible after about a century and a half, long and continuously present and among the most reproduced images of its decade; a form in which isolation is placement, the figures pushed to the corner by empty tables and walled by a mirror; a narrow palette held exact, with the cloudy glass as its one luminous note; and a figure picture with very little idle in it, turned from the centre at the risk of looking like a mistake.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.8: consciousness, the couple, the city, class and the working artist, drink and the woman alone in public, held in one arrangement, with no family, labour, state, sacred or natural order. Then The Sublime at 7.2: one cold rise, in her face and the glass, pitched low by design. Then The Archetypal Deep at 7.4: a myth of the couple and of urban solitude summoned by the subject, where the structure builds isolation. Then The Bottomless Well at 8.2: return that keeps finding things in the picture, over fewer questions than the largest canvases of its time.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.5 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.7, The Made at 8.7, The Inner Law at 8.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on three of five: The Imperishable at 9.1 clears the bar of 8.5 and The Swerve meets it exactly at 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.4, Pressure on Tradition at 8.4 and The Archetypal Deep at 7.4 fall short of it, the disclosure one condition with the inner life closed, the reach shared with the café as a subject and with Degas’s method, the myth evoked and not built. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Sublime, 7.2, and The Archetypal Deep, 7.4, both below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.8. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 98.3, an average of 8.19 that displays 8.2, in Tier IV, two tenths above the 8.0 at which it begins and short of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the canvas as an image and a composition, from long acquaintance in reproduction and its place in the literature on Degas and the painting of modern life; known thinly on its surface, condition and technical history. No image or written source was consulted. The work scored is the single canvas as it stands: Edgar Degas, L’Absinthe, also titled Dans un café, oil on canvas, painted 1875 to 1876, about 92 by 68.5 cm, upright, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. No loss of figure or field is known; its condition is not stated and is weighed on The Imperishable alone. The proportion, about 1.34 to 1, is computed from the dimensions; the share of the field given to the figures and to the empty tables is estimated from the image, not measured. Manet’s Absinthe Drinker and Degas’s other café, theatre and race pictures are context. Only the two titles are quoted. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the signature, the name of the café, the objects on the near table, the picture’s owners and sales, its showings in London and in Paris and the dispute over it in London, the date and route by which it entered the national collection, and the particular works of Toulouse-Lautrec that descend from it.