The MFA exhibition is the first museum show ever devoted to the subject of Degas’s career-long engagement with the naked human form. Organized by the MFA’s outgoing chairman of the Art of Europe, George Shackelford, along with the Musee d’Orsay’s Xavier Rey, it contains 160 works, more than a third of them lent by the Paris museum (where the show will open in March).
From the 1870s until about 10 years before his death in 1917, Degas knocked out one magnificently drawn, gauchely posed female nude after another. Only the means and the materials changed - charcoal, pastel, paint, monotype, lithograph, clay, pastel on monotype, and so on.
These now look like some of the greatest nudes in the history of Western art. Picking up on cultural currents that were gaining momentum in the mid-19th century, Degas aggressively stripped away centuries of idealization, sentimentality, and pomposity to reveal the female form as it was.
There was, however, an obsessiveness about the endeavor that can be disconcerting. You sense pride in Degas’s refusal to prettify, and relish in the way he continually contrived the most awkward-looking poses for his models. Right from the beginning, people described them as brutal, cruel, animalistic.
But Degas’s almost machine-like detachment is in constant tension with a sustained engagement that is sensual, marveling, and tactile. The effect, aesthetically, is a hot and cold dynamic unlike anything else in art.
Degas was the oldest of five children (three others died in infancy). His mother, worn out by child-bearing, died when he was 13. He was a lifelong bachelor who said he wanted to be “illustrious and unknown.’’
He had, according to biographer Roy McMullen, “an ironic intelligence and veiled morosity.’’ Unlike his friend and rival, Édouard Manet, who adored women (just as they seemed to adore him), Degas’s relationships with women were difficult to characterize.
