Edgar Degas A Match Made In Paris By N.f. Karlins

Hows your joy quotient? If you can use some livening up, I can guarantee youll find plenty in the parade of late, deliriously

sensual nudes on view in the huge loan show Degas and the Nude, which remains on view for about one more month at the Museum of

Fine Arts in Boston. This is the first exhibition to treat this key theme in Degas art.
Edgar Degas (1834-1917) is most famous for his ballet dancers, and is also celebrated for his caf, opera and racetrack scenes -- but

about 20 percent of Degass output was nudes. That percentage is much higher if you include his early, student works, since drawing

the nude was the foundation for artistic study in mid-19th-century Paris.
By the beginning of the 1880s, Degas was turning out one masterpiece after another, and many of them were nudes. By 1890, his work

was selling well and he retreated to his studio, continuing to produce work until his eyes deteriorated, a few years before his

death. After that point, he never exhibited his work in a public exhibition again. A great many of his nude paintings and sculptures

appeared on the market only after his death, and this might account for how surprised his fans, and the market, were to see them.

This exhibition, however, proves that they still stun and enchant.
Many of Degass pastels and oils from the 1880s onward are thrilling in their color and compelling in their intimacy, like his small

pastel over monotype Woman Leaving Her Bath (1886). The bright, carefully orchestrated colors swirl around the pale nude,

highlighting her figure with a gentle play of light over the flesh. Only a single figure is visible in the frame, and the viewer has

her all to him- or herself. Yet the result is about as far from erotic voyeurism as possible. Instead, this sensual work carries

within it an innate dignity and discretion, which undercuts the overt eroticism of the figure. It is not an artificial confection

composed to titillate, like some Orientalist fantasy, but rather holds a kind of natural truth.
How Degas unique blend of reverence for the artistic past with the freedoms claimed by his fellow Impressionists developed over the

course of his career is a thrilling narrative, and it is unreeled in this must-see exhibition filling nine galleries displaying more

than 150 drawings, oils, prints, sculptures and even a few remarkable photographs. It ends with works by artists who learned from him

-- Paul Gauguin, Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso.
Degas artistic career began with aspirations to become a history painter. After study in France and three years spent in Italy in

the late 1850s, the young artist finally submitted his first history painting, the worked and reworked Scene of War in the Middle

Ages (1863-65), to the Salon, where it was exhibited in 1865. Although it has been declared a masterpiece of his early years, I find

its composition too odd, confused by too many muddled passages, to be compelling -- but it does presage a number of poses and

postures, in its nude figures, that Degas would use and reuse in the future, and is certainly an important document as such.