The Artist has manic energy; everyone in this new TV series is yelling all the time. Even Edgar Degas. Even Thomas Edison. Even the robber baron and his wife and their live-in ballerina.
This is art history at its most unhinged. But asking friends, “Have you seen The Artist on The Network?” has produced mostly furrowed-brow responses: this great TV show seems little-known at the moment, and the question is made enigmatic by its generic-sounding proper nouns. The final episodes air December 25 on a new, free, ad-sponsored platform created by the show’s director Aram Rappaport, and I recommend tuning in.
The Artist opens with a graying widow (Janet McTeer) at her desk, writing in a diary or perhaps drafting a memoir. She informs us that the show is less about murder, and instead is primarily a cautionary tale. I suppose this is true, if only technically.
We watch as maids use a rug to roll up a body—her dead robber-baron husband—then throw him to the flames. The blonde ballerina, in her Tinker Bell-ish tutu, stands by her side as they watch him burn.
Janet McTeer as Marian Henry in The Artist.
What happened? Whodunit? To find out, we go back in time, naturally; back to “that period of marriage where we loathed each other,” per our narrator-widow. She is obviously the main murder suspect—so obvious, it can’t actually be her, right?
The house is frantic. An artist is coming. So is Thomas Edison. The wife-cum-widow is furious: they don’t actually have money to spend on art at the moment, and she refuses to sit for a portrait.
Fine, says her husband. We’ll have him paint the poodles.
Meanwhile, our protagonist has beef with Edison, too—her old teacher-slash-lover stole her research to invent the light bulb, justifying the theft by saying that a woman’s work would never be taken seriously—a prophecy he himself took the liberty of fulfilling.
The robber baron (Mandy Patinkin) knows his wife abhors Edison (Hank Azaria) but not why, and ignores her pleas to send him packing, insisting he cannot pass up an Edison-esque investment opportunity given the state that they are in.
The broke baron has decamped from New York to the couple’s summer home in Rhode Island, only it is winter, and a hoard of help is living outside in tents, evidently impervious to the cold. They prepare fastidiously for the esteemed guests—the artist and the inventor. They rush around, their adrenaline contagious.
The whole thing is as chaotic as a soap opera, but it’s also frenzied and irreverent in a Kardashian–Jackass–Punk’d kind of way. It is also somewhat serious and smart, full of history and art and science that makes it feel a lot less like trashy TV. But never too serious: the word “fuck” appears in the title of every episode.
When the wounded carriage driver comes to see the doctor after delivering Degas, our M.D. is busy sodomizing another man, bent over a table with his pants around his ankles. The doctor tells his wailing patient he must be hallucinating from blood loss, then finishes the job before attending to his wounds.
Amid the camp and chaos—which at times veers a little cheesy—there are fun and accurate art-historical easter eggs as well as wild exaggerations. Jarring contemporary lingo, words like “shagging” and “unhoused,” punctuates frenetic dialogues delivered in 19th-century-ish garb. Self-aware sexist statements toe the line between artifact and caricature, as with the claim that “married women should not be left unattended in rooms.”
Degas goes unnamed for several episodes, but art lovers will piece it together quickly. First of all, the actor, Danny Huston, looks the part. And there are so many scenes with the ballerina dancing or bathing that it’s hard not to think of the artist.
The show is shot in the Hill-Stead Museum in Connecticut, with all its original paintings and furnishings; real works by Monet, Manet, Cassatt, and yes, Degas are visible on the walls in several scenes. Jokes abound about the guest with frizzy gray hair being an artist who is nearly blind—as Degas was for much of his career, though the show fudges the timing, relegating his impairment to an unfortunate late-in-life decline.
Waning vision was less impediment than impetus for Degas’s work: it’s how he avoided military service and why he drew with thick black lines. It’s why he worked indoors, away from the searing sun, and eventually began to sculpt (“a blind man’s trade,” he liked to say).
As with all historical fiction, the show is as much about our time as theirs; class rage connects then and now. The Artist muddles the timeline: we meet a final-days Degas as the Kinetoscope is being invented, though the artist died in 1917 and the device dates to 1891.
The fictional and factual Degases are both antisemitic, though onscreen he refuses to sell his work to Jews, where the real one did not. And what is Degas doing in Rhode Island? The show has him down on his luck in old age, spending his last pennies to board a steamboat across the Atlantic. In reality, he died a rich Parisian, occasionally visiting New Orleans where his family worked in cotton.
Our Degas crosses the pond in poverty and shame, embarrassed by the reception of his sculptures—which in real life he made mostly privately, only ever showing one, Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen. This was an embarrassing affair indeed, with the Impressionists lambasting its realism, especially in its materials—her fabric tutu, the satin ribbon tied around her hair. When Degas died, over 100 wax and clay sculptures were found in his studio, and his heirs authorized bronze editions that he never cast himself. Now, those casts are prized possessions of museums worldwide.
In the land of opportunities, Degas winds up taking a commission from a robber baron who turns out to be just as broke as he. Since the baron has no money, he cannot pay for the poodle portrait, so the artist does not leave, distrustful of his promissory note.
Upon meeting the poodles, the painter finds them fidgety, calls them “existentially uncomfortable.” “Who isn’t?” the robber baron—a Jew, apparently unbeknownst to Degas—replies.
The ballerina, meanwhile, dances for a dangled promise of a return home to Paris with the patriarch as her ballet benefactor. Promises of a future keep her literally on her toes, dancing for the rich.
Lines between artist and prostitute blur, and not just with the ballerina-whore: everyone but the robber baron must sell something precious and pretend to enjoy doing it for mere shelter and food.
Ever Anderson as Evelyn Nesbit in The Artist.
Enter Evelyn Nesbit (Ever Anderson), an initially grating, attention-seeking character based on a real-life crime-of-the-century it-girl of the same name. Everyone keeps calling her the woman on the swing—referencing real events but also bringing that Rococo painting by Jean-Honoré Fragonard to mind each time. And we know that after Rococo comes the Revolution, as the masses tire of poverty and revolt against their exploitation in service of the excessive enjoyment of the wealthy few.
Herein lies the show’s unstated cleverness, its rare moment subtlety: the hazy lines between art, labor, and prostitution had always been Degas’s central theme. Though labeled an Impressionist (and indeed part of the movement’s original exhibitions), he fashioned himself a Realist, aligning with the latter movement’s class politics—using art to expose the reality of working conditions.
His impressionistic blurriness owed as much to his blindness as to his beliefs: what he cared about was labor, and time and agian, he showed dancers and prostitutes exploited at the hands of wealthy men.
But a one-liner in the show boils this down brutally: he is no better than the men he critiqued, having made his career off aspiring young women who remained destitute as he grew rich—just as Edison stole the widow’s work, resigning her to a life as a housewife.
For the fictional Degas, there is karmic justice: he winds up poor himself, and soon, circumstances force him to align with the destitute-prostitute class. He’s no stranger to the struggle. Degas and the dancer team up for a little French Revolution as it becomes clear they have both been conned, trapped awaiting promises and payments the robber baron cannot keep.
“The poodles,” the painter realizes, “are a metaphor for my life. I am but a trained hound in the hand of my master.”
I won’t tell you whodunit or how, but know that the robber baron dies in the most Jackass way one possibly could have before the invention of the skateboard—body horror meets a juvenile joke. Class revolt and feminist revenge become impotence incarnate.
And the poodle painting winds up at a twenty-first-century yard sale, where it sells for three dollars, laughed off as fake, despite the signature, because it is so bad.
