Written by DCist contributor Genevieve Smith.

Tucked away in an upstairs corner at the Phillips Collection, two remarkable little watercolors, barely bigger than postcards, depict early experimentations into abstraction, decades before abstract art would really take hold in Europe. Washes of color dance across the page of Arthur Melville’s Dancers at the Moulin Rouge (at right), but the forms do not so much as hint at the shape of actual dancers. Instead, the bursts of color blend together, like Rothkos in miniature. Dating from 1889, the images are startling early examples of modernist art from a time when most artists were just beginning to experiment with line and form. It is gems like these that make the Degas, Sickert, Toulouse-Lautrec show, organized by London’s Tate Britain, well worth the $12 admissions fee.

Like the Dada retrospective currently at the National Gallery, the Phillips exhibition aims to elucidate a cross-continental dialogue between artists of a particular movement, in this case focusing specifically on the connection between French and British artists at the end of the nineteenth century. The show pays particular homage to the influence of Degas on both his French and British contemporaries. Those already interested in romantic or impressionist art need no convincing; the exhibition is saturated in both canonical works, such as Degas’s L’Absinthe and Sickert’s Minnie Cunningham, as well as lesser known examples of Degas and Sickert’s experimentation with line, color, light and composition. Pieces such as George Claussen’s A Spring Morning, Haverstock Hill and The Old Bedford Music Hall by Sickert, depicting those at the fringes of high society–dancers, actors and the working class–also highlight early departures from classical subjects.