Degas Day Trips

Art Exhibits Featuring Degas during the 2011-12 Season

by Miriam Schulman 

Mark your calendars and program your GPS devices for three great exhibits featuring Edgar Degas opening up in the Northeast this season.

Degas, Dancers at the Barre

Degas’s Dancers at the Barre: Point and Counterpoint

The Phillips Collection. Washington DC

October 1, 2011–January 8, 2012

The impressionist master’s relentless experiments with movement and dance culminated in Dancers at the Barre, one of the greatest works in The Phillips Collection. The exhibition brings together about 30 related paintings, works on paper, and bronzes, from some of the world’s greatest collections as well as featured work by Degas in the Phillips’s permanent collection. 

Edgar Degas, La Toilette

Degas and the Nude 

Museum of Fine Arts Boston

October 9, 2011 - February 5, 2012

The nude figure was critical to the art of Edgar Degas from the beginning of his career in the 1850s until the end of his working life, but the subject has never before been explored in a Museum exhibition. “Degas and the Nude,” co-organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, features paintings, pastels, drawings, prints, and sculpture, and calls attention to the evolution of Degas's nude.

Scholars make a strong case for the influence of Rembrandt on Degas

Rembrandt and Degas: Two Young Artists

Starts at The Clark in Williamstown

November 13, 2011 - February 5, 2012 and travels to The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Feb. 23, 2012- May 5, 2012

First the Clark brought Picasso looks at Degas, now we have another exciting scholarly exhibition but showing Degas' inspirations. As a developing artist he studied the portraiture of earlier masters, perhaps none more closely than Rembrandt, who had made self-portraits throughout his life. Degas encountered Rembrandt’s etchings during his student years and on subsequent travels in Italy, and he made several direct copies of Rembrandt’s prints. This experience seems to have stimulated Degas’s own exploration of the technical and expressive potential of portraiture and self-portraiture in painted and graphic form.

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