WASHINGTON, DC.-The engagement between Britain and France from 1870 to 1910 was artistically stimulating, commercially successful, and critically sensational. This was a period when artists broke away from academic salons and began to explore the streets of their newly modernized cities. In February, The Phillips Collection, America’s first museum of modern art, will be the sole U.S. venue for the seminal Degas, Sickert and Toulouse-Lautrec: London and Paris, 1870–1910, the first exhibition to explore the influential yet largely unrecognized creative dialogue between artists working in London and Paris at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. Organized by Tate Britain in London and the first collaboration between the Phillips and the Tate, the exhibition will open in Washington on February 18 and will remain on view until May 14, 2006.

In the mid-1870s, the most significant holding of the works of Edgar Degas was in a private collection in Brighton, England. Twenty years later, in 1898, an exhibition of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s work opened at a gallery in London; it was the largest exhibition of his work held during his lifetime. A few years after that, the prominent British artist Walter Sickert moved to France, deepening his friendship with Degas. During his time in France, Sickert’s work developed an affinity with the intimate interiors of Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard.

While focusing on Degas’ formative influence on the painting of Sickert and his contemporaries, the exhibition will also highlight the crucial importance of the British art market to French artists and include innovative depictions of modern life by Bonnard, Vuillard, James Tissot, Sir William Rothenstein, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler. This will be the first major exhibition to show these artists’ works together and to explore in depth the dynamic cultural exchange between Britain and France in this historically significant period. Comprising more than 90 works, the exhibition includes both well-known works from public collections and many pieces from private collections that have never before been on public view.

“The Phillips Collection is pleased to bring this remarkable exhibition to American audiences,” said Jay Gates, director. “From its founding, the Phillips has focused on the emergence of modernism in Europe and America. Not only did founder Duncan Phillips recognize the importance of early modernists, collecting the work of artists such as Degas, Bonnard, Vuillard, and Toulouse-Lautrec, he was the first museum director in the United States to acquire a painting by Sickert.”

A CULTURAL REVOLUTION: Continuing in Duncan Phillips’ tradition of displaying works from different nations side by side rather than separating them by school, the exhibition, arranged chronologically, will juxtapose British and French works related by their modern subject matter, daring compositions, and innovative technique. The intricate web of artistic influences and friendships that defined the development of modern art in London and Paris, and the vital role of critics, exhibitions, collectors, and the subject of the modern city will be made strikingly apparent as the decades unfold.

Throughout Europe, the 1870s was a decade of cultural revolution, a decisive moment in the development of a modern style of figure painting pioneered by Degas. In an attempt to express modernity through painting, a medium heavy with historic and cultural implications, Degas and his contemporaries began to experiment with unusual viewpoints and asymmetrical compositions. Centered on the human figure, this new style drew its subjects chiefly from metropolitan life, depicting the public world of the bourgeoisie at the opera, the circus, and on the boulevard.

Degas’ rendering of images from contemporary life in daring, even seemingly haphazard compositions continued into the 1880s, deeply influencing artists on both sides of the English Channel. His painting Dancers in the Rehearsal Room (1882–5) exemplifies Degas’ preoccupation with theatrical subjects and penchant for dramatic compositions. In the foreground a ballet dancer bends down to tie her lace, the tulle of her skirt fanning out in a soft circle that echoes the curves of the upright bass lying on the floor near her. Degas juxtaposes this dancer with a cluster of dancers rehearsing in the background, several of whom are partially cropped out of the image, creating a dramatic perspective and sharp angles to place the viewer in the rehearsal room.

Paintings such as Dancers in the Rehearsal Room were well known in England and profoundly influential for British artists, most notably Sickert, who shared Degas’ interest in disconcerting light effects, unorthodox viewing angles, and the artificial world of the theater. For example, Sickert’s painting The P.S. Wings in the O.P. Mirror (1889) explores the sharp contrasts of this world, portraying a side view of a young actress performing. Though pictured under scorching lights in a vivid red dress, she seems largely ignored by the audience in the shadowy foreground.

By the 1890s, the British increasingly linked French culture with modern decadence and depravity, as expressed in paintings like Degas’ L’Absinthe (1875–6). Two celebrities of the era, actress Ellen André and artist Marcellin Désboutin, are portrayed in a Parisian café, slumped numbly at their table after imbibing the potent green alcohol of the painting’s title. This revealing glimpse into the sometimes-seediness of private lives of public figures was just one of the controversial aspects of this work, which outraged London’s Victorian society when it was first exhibited there in 1893.

Toulouse-Lautrec, primarily known in England through his posters and graphic art, depicted the cabaret singers, circus performers, can-can dancers, drug addicts, and prostitutes that reflected the dissolute side of Parisian nightlife. In 1898, London presented the largest exhibition of Toulouse-Lautrec’s work during his lifetime. One painting in the show, Monsieur Samary, de la Comédie Française (1889) depicts a man in a purple waistcoat stepping confidently forward on stage, raising a monocle to his comically masked face, top hat in hand. The vibrant colors, bold lines and loose brushstrokes of works like this one greatly influenced the young British artists who went to Paris to join his circle and experience its vibrant nightlife firsthand.

During the first decade of the 20th century, British and French artists, most notably Sickert, Bonnard, and Vuillard, explored related motifs and formal inventions developed from the example of Degas. Nudes and interiors by these artists will show their shared preoccupation with treating the figure in ways that can be traced back to Degas, but which also point to new developments in 20th-century art. Sickert’s mysterious painting La Hollandaise shows a voluptuous nude lounging on a bed, the sheets rumpled, her face and much of her torso hidden by shadow. Here, the artist explores what he called “the unaccustomed points of view” he had learned from Degas. These British and French artists adopted Degas’ intimate approach, utilizing it in new and surprising ways.

This exhibition breaks new ground in presenting the artistic conversations, friendships, and rivalries that took place across the Channel in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. By displaying paintings by Degas alongside those by Sickert, and by juxtaposing Sickert’s work with Toulouse-Lautrec’s, the works themselves are allowed to suggest their own harmony and dissonance.