The scariest painting in the United States at the moment is not a shark in formaldehyde or a madonna covered in dung, but this painting (sorry, the copy is in black and white) by the Impressionist painter, Edgar Degas, from 1878. It is on a brief loan to the Met in New York from the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, so if you don't go and see it there in the next 2 months, you will have to go to Portugal sometime. The official title of the painting is Henri Michel-Levy, and it is supposed to be a portrait of a not very talented painter friend of Degas. It does not look very sensational. In reality, it is a thinly disguised painting of Degas himself; and an even more thinly disguised painting of his complex relations with women, models, painting, life.
The figure in the bottom right hand corner is a model's dummy, a stuffed female doll used in 19th century setups for paintings. Degas shows her crumpled and cast aside, while the artist, in his shirt sleeves, looks complacently awkwardly out at the world, surrounded by his pastoral paintings.
Degas' relations with women were notoriously painful. He is recognised as one of the great painters of women -- ballet dancers, washer women, nude bathers, elegant dames -- and was a staunch champion of Mary Cassatt, whom he befriended when she came to Paris. But he seems to have turned misogynist and bitter, for reasons that have never been clearly explained. He never married, and though stories were rampant about his relations with Cassatt and other women of the day -- probably unfounded -- it is clear that he was unable to sustain a loving bond with any of them. He was probably reduced to having sex with his models (mostly poor women of the street) and with women in brothels. His later paintings are agonies of sensuality mingled with voyeurism: the female body just out of reach, but caressable by the extended brush loaded with paint.

The painting is about the painter's strangeness as a human being, and about the way in which his painting both connected him intimately to women, and simultaneously disconnected him from them, and let him cast them aside, all used up. The painter is seen as something of a trapped voyeur: the model dummy is like some 19th century version of the pneumatic women one can buy in porn shops -- a tool, not a real woman. Only the name change protects Degas from the full indictment of his own self-contempt. It is a far harsher attack on his life and work than anything a radical feminist could throw at him. It is calm, and slyly vicious, and every time I look at it, it scares the hell out of me.