By Paul Richard
Special to The Washington Post
Saturday, February 18, 2006

Poor Walter Sickert.

First he gets slandered as a slasher, and not just any slasher. In 2002, mystery writer Patricia Cornwell (best known for her 16 Dr. Kay Scarpetta mysteries) published a whole book that claimed the so-so painter was really . . . Jack the Ripper .

Now Sickert finds himself smack in the middle of "Degas, Sickert and Toulouse-Lautrec: London and Paris, 1870-1910" at the Phillips Collection, where the pressure is too much.

Sickert has a problem here. His problem is his pictures. Memorable and moody though some of them may be, more are merely clunky. It isn't really fair, but Sickert in the Phillips's show is embarrassingly out-painted. The great Edgar Degas (1834-1917) and the also-great Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) seldom left a clunky mark, and Sickert, squeezed between them, ends up getting squashed.

Still, he ought to be here, for this exhibit tells a story. It has cliches to puncture and surprises to reveal, and Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942) is crucial to its plot.

This is how we meet him. Sickert, an assistant to James McNeill Whistler, is working as a courier (accompanying the picture now called "Whistler's Mother" to the Paris Salon) when he first encounters Degas in 1883. Sickert is, well, awe-struck, and Degas is much taken by this unusual young man.

Sickert wasn't just a painter. He had also spent four years as one of Sir Henry Irving's touring English actors, and Degas, as his pictures show, also loved the stage. The sight of Degas' pictures gave Sickert a new mission. Hereafter he would be Degas' unofficial ambassador to England, his disciple and promoter. In becoming such, young Sickert would also help destroy the imaginary barrier that is still thought to exist between French and English art.

Italian art is about God; French art is about art; English art, instead, is merely about living well. Generalities like these, a commonplace in art-talk, are undone by this show.

The case it makes is this: When it came to advanced painting, to urban advanced painting, Paris and London weren't really far apart.

They were nodes on the same network. Degas soon would be a celebrity in England. Whistler thrived in France. During the Franco-Prussian War the impressionist Camille Pissarro was a refugee in Norwood, a drab south London suburb, and though Pissarro soon went home, other French painters stayed. Jacques-Joseph-James Tissot, for instance, a star of the exhibit, spent 11 years in London. Henri Fantin-Latour spent an English summer in Sunbury-on-Thames. Claude Monet, when flush, preferred the best hotels. His shimmering pictures of the Thames were painted while he stayed in a suite in the Savoy.

Whistler, we know, was at ease in both great cities. So was William Rothenstein, an Englishman from Bradford whose portraits are among the treats of this display.

In "Toulouse-Lautrec in Montmartre," a big show seen last year at the National Gallery of Art, the Frenchman was presented as a most Parisian painter. The curator of that show, art historian Richard Thomson, is co-curator of this one. In the present exhibition, which comes from Tate Britain in London, he has another point to make: French and British painters crossed the Channel all the time.

So, too, did ideas. The notion of the dandy flourished in both capitals. While the swift Parisian brush was gaining ground in London, savage British satire, traveling the other way, was beginning to affect the advanced art of France. Both Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec learned quite a bit from Punch.

Paris-London commerce was made smoother by the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871. For though the English and the French had been enemies for centuries, they got on a whole lot better once Bismarck's Prussian armies began marching across France. To Parisians who had seen Germans shell their city, the dreadful Brits across the water no longer seemed so bad.

Before World War I the two cities seemed a match. London was where the money was. Paris had finer food, of course, and a lower cost of living, and more available females, or so it was thought. Finding models there was easy. So was ogling the dancing girls, and not only ogling. One sees this in the faces of the lecherous "milords" soliciting easy women in the posters of Lautrec.

The show has many highlights. Among these is the conjunction, and the unexpected rhyming, of Whistler's "Harmony in Grey and Green: Miss Cicely Alexander" (1872-74) and Degas' famous bronze "Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen" (1880-81). The self-confident banker's daughter and the monkeylike standing dancer strike precisely the same pose.

Degas' "L'Absinthe" (1875-76), which shows a woman stoned on that green beverage, is similarly striking displayed all by itself. The canvas was a scandal once. When it sold at Christie's in 1892, the audience in the salesroom hissed its disreputable theme.

These objects are familiar. But many shown are not. Few viewers will have previously seen "Dancers at the Moulin Rouge," a sketch by Arthur Melville that is abstract as a Rorschach blot. At first I thought it showed a Skye terrier on a couch.

It didn't happen all at once, but Sickert won his art campaign. French painting, partly thanks to him, gradually became respectable in Britain. Soon he would be championing such English avant-gardists as Augustus John and Wyndham Lewis. Still, even as he did so, he kept his eye on France. And he soon stopped aping Degas. Later, as a member of London's Camden Town Group, he would choose to bow instead to such free-brushing French painters as Vuillard and Bonnard.

This visiting show from London is just right for the Phillips, for it casts a useful light on that gallery's collection. This is its one stop in America. It closes May 14.

Degas, Sickert and Toulouse-Lautrec: London and Paris, 1870-1910 is a truncated version of the exhibition seen last year at Tate Britain. Anna Gruetzner Robins and Richard Thomson are its curators. Admission to the Phillips, 1600 21st NW, is $12, and $10 for students and people older than 62. The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., until 8:30 Thursday evenings, and from noon until 7 p.m. on Sundays. It is closed Mondays. The show's Washington display is funded by ING Direct. For more information see http://www.phillipscollection.org/ .