Art reviews: Discovering Degas, Burrell Collection, Glasgow | Adam Bruce Thomson, City Art Centre, Edinburgh

The first major exhibition at the newly refurbished Burrell Collection, Discovering Degas focuses on the artist’s skill as an observer of human behaviour, writes Duncan Macmillan

Discovering Degas: Collecting in the Time of William Burrell, Burrell Collection, Glasgow *****

Adam Bruce Thomson: The Quiet Path, City Art Centre, Edinburgh ****

According to the website ArtUK, there are 79 works by Degas in public collections in the UK. Renoir has 69, Pissarro 62 and Cézanne 49, but the ever-popular Monet has only 48. Clearly Degas was the collectors’ choice and his Dancers on a Stage, bought by Captain Henry Hill in 1876 just two years after it was painted, was the first work by him acquired by a British collector. He remained popular with collectors, too, and though he came to it late, making most of his purchases after Degas’s death in 1917, William Burrell was the most assiduous. Eventually he had 24 works by Degas, though only 22 were eventually left with his collection to Glasgow. This story, with the Burrell pictures at its heart, is the subject of Discovering Degas: Collecting in the Time of William Burrell, the first major exhibition in the refurbished museum.

Before the Performance by Edgar Degas, which will feature in the Discovering Degas: Collecting in the Age of William Burrell exhibition at the Burrell Collection

So why did Degas have so much more appeal for collectors than his fellow Impressionists? The cynical answer might be that Degas’s favourite subjects were women, frequently naked or semi-naked, under-age girl ballet dancers, and horses. (There are however also two striking portraits in the exhibition.) That is unkind about Degas, certainly, but there might be a grain of truth in it about the motives of some of his collectors, although latterly they did include several women.

Degas’s choice of subjects certainly did distinguish him from the other Impressionists. There are no landscapes here, no boating parties or lush gardens. He was the artist of city life seen so casually that the traditional rules of composition simply don’t apply. One of the first works here and the first to enter a public collection in the UK is, for instance, of an opera performance. Seen from just behind the orchestra, spectators’ heads and woodwind pipes take up half the composition. One man with opera glasses is studying the people in the boxes, not the stage. Human behaviour is the subject, not the opera.

L’Absinthe, a picture once in a Glasgow collection courtesy of the pioneer Glasgow dealer Alexander Reid and here on loan from the Musée d’Orsay, is a sad and enigmatic picture of a couple in a cafe, but mainly of the woman, a depressed-looking city girl wondering about her life. It is the immediate intimacy that is startling. Victorian painters were painting socially conscious pictures by this time, but always with some sense of our distance from whatever tragedy is portrayed. With no distance at all, this scene is raw. So too is Degas’s portrayal of laundresses. Pictures here show them both at work and at rest, but there is nothing remotely sentimental in the way he portrays their harsh working conditions.

Technically too, particularly when he took to using pastels, you would think Degas’s work was especially difficult for people used to high finish. The “Impressionist” gap between what we see and what he has put down with pastel or brush is often startling. Look closely at the faces in the Red Ballet Skirts, for instance, and they are just blots and blurs. Detached, brilliant, vermillion marks on the principal figure in Three Dancers seem as independent as a flight of birds, yet the image is completely coherent. His figure drawing and choice of poses in his ballet pictures, but also in his beautiful bronzes – all but two are of naked girls – is also as far as it could be from academic formality, yet it can be ravishingly beautiful as it is in the drawing Dancer Adjusting her Shoulder Strap. (The strap is imaginary. The dancer is naked.)

Ruby Quinn of Jazzart Motherwell at the launch of Discovering Degas. Photo: John Devlin

The intimacy seen in that lovely drawing is even more startling in a group of major pastels of naked women enjoying their privacy as they wash themselves, or brush their hair. Here you have to take off your selective, “looking at art” specs and see what is actually in front of you. The author of the label to Woman in a Tub clearly did not take them off, however, writing that perhaps what interested Degas most in this astonishingly intimate image was “colour and form.” The colour is brilliant certainly, but the form here, or in the lovely picture of a woman leaning over a basin to wash her breasts, is close, intimate and vulnerably human. Degas was a self-professed voyeur. He wanted these pictures to look as though seen through a keyhole. The same is true, if to a lesser extent, of ballet pictures like Preparation for a Class. Forget colour and form, here the intimacy is transgressive, brutal even, but for Degas, and perhaps also for William Burrell, that was the point. Still, the result is extremely beautiful and very human.

Collectors were not alone in their enthusiasm for Degas. The artists in the RSA made him an honorary member in 1911 and his work appeared in the annual exhibitions in the following years. At just this time, Adam Bruce Thomson, celebrated in Adam Bruce Thomson: the Quiet Path at Edinburgh City Art Centre and in an excellent accompanying biography by curator Helen Scott, began teaching at Edinburgh College of Art. He had graduated in 1909, but began his studies in the Trustees Academy. At the beginning of 1909, staff, students and indeed the curriculum of the old institution moved wholesale from the RSA to the new college building in Lauriston Place. Thomson stayed at the college till 1950 and so his quiet path linked the old Trustees Academy with the stars of the post-war college.

Art teaching then was skill-based and Thomson was evidently a good teacher. Those he taught ranged from William Gillies, Anne Redpath and William Johnstone to Elizabeth Blackadder and John Houston. He was modest but also evidently a warm and likeable person. His close friendships included both fellow students like DM Sutherland and former students like Gillies, William Crozier and William Wilson. Although his name is less familiar, his work sold well in his lifetime. If quietly, he was also a champion of modernity and that is reflected in his art.

Early work here includes drawings done travelling in France and Spain, but also prints. An etching of the canal basin at Fountainbridge from c.1913, for instance, is very accomplished. A lithograph portrait of Miss Chambers is also really beautiful. Serving with the Royal Engineers during the war, he continued to draw and a striking print shows engineers building a bridge, seen from below and silhouetted against the light.

The Road to Ben Cruachan, c.1932, by Adam Bruce Thomson PIC: Private Collection. © the artist's estate.

Some of his finest paintings were done in the 1920s and are touched by cool, almost geometric clarity suggesting his interest in Cubism. These include a beautiful painting of a woman washing clothes, but a star here is From My Bedroom Window. Framed by the window, a white basin and towel sit on a table top. The drawing is precise but elegant and is set off by a group of nearly cubist trees seen against the sky. In the thirties, the same structural clarity is seen in a lovely painting of the old Dean Bridge, but his colour also became richer and his treatment more dramatic as it is in Cedars of c.1931, for instance, or in his thunderous masterpiece, North Bridge and Salisbury Crags. He continued to paint till shortly before his death in 1976 at the age of 91. His later work of scenes around Edinburgh and further afield in Scotland is expressive but its quality remained high and his darkly dramatic painting Rising Moon: Arthur’s Seat won a prize in the RSA in the year of his death.

Discovering Degas until 30 September; Adam Bruce Thomson until 6 October