Degas Exhibition Comes Full Circle At Sackler

In 1911, Edgar Degas’ ballerinas made their stunning first debut at Harvard, wowing crowds for nine days in April with their graceful tutus and practiced movements.

Now, almost 100 years later, they have returned for an encore.

From August 1 until November 27, the Arthur M. Sackler Museum will host “Degas at Harvard,” an exhibition of over 60 of the French artist’s pieces, in media ranging from sculpture to sonnet.

The exhibition—which consists exclusively of pieces owned by or promised to Harvard—will trace the University’s relationship with the artist, one that began early and was deepened by the interest of long-serving museum curators and the generosity of wealthy donors.

“Our interest really was to try to explore the intellectual position of the artist vis-à-vis the museum and Harvard more broadly,” said Stephan Wolohojian, a curator at the University Art Museum’s Department of Paintings, Sculpture, and Decorative Arts, and one of the two full-time curators of the exhibit.

A lecture series featuring leading Degas experts, including Richard Thomsen of the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and Hollis Clayson of Northwestern, and an undergraduate seminar led by Wolohojian, will accompany the exhibit.

Scenes of ballerinas, nudes, and jockeys at the racetrack dominate Degas’ work, and the curators have hung the exhibit thematically to highlight the ways Degas reworked familiar images to generate “dialogue” between the pieces.

“That’s what thrilled us most: to be able to juxtapose all those works,” said Edward Saywell, the Cunningham curatorial associate in the department of drawings.

The largest space in the three-room exhibit, for example, contrasts sculptures cast in bronze, like “Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen,” against the rich colors of “Two Dancers Entering the Stage” and other works of ballerinas in rehearsal.

“QUESTIONABLE TASTE”

The Fogg exhibit in 1911 was the first and only solo show held at a museum during Degas’ lifetime. It was considered at the time a bold move by Denmon W. Ross, a Fogg curator looking to attract a younger audience with contemporary art.

“[Degas’] subjects were considered in questionable taste—jockeys and naked ladies in their bathtubs,” said Marjorie B. Cohn, the Weyerhaeuser Curator of Prints emerita, who wrote an article for the exhibit’s catalog.

“Naked ladies were fine as long as you pretended they were Venus,” she added.

One of the newest acquisitions of Degas’ nudes came from Emily Pulitzer, of the Pulitzer Foundation, who worked at the museum from 1957 to 1964 and has promised four of the exhibit’s works.

One of these works, “Dancers, Nude Study,” will be donated to the museum in honor of the retirement of James Cuno, who was director of the museums until December 2002.

“I think that Harvard’s drawing collection is so strong that I wanted to give something that would be of that quality, and there isn’t really another drawing of this character in the exhibition,” said Pulitzer.

Though many consider Degas an early—and influential—impressionist, his work reflects classical training, and his experimentation with a variety of media defies easy classification.

“One of the extraordinary things about Degas was that he was a draftsman like none other, a great master of the pastel, really an innovator in printmaking, and a pioneering photographer as well,” said Wolohojian. “Our collection has truly central works in all those media so that we are able to really assess the full range of the artists’ work.”

Thomsen, who will deliver a lecture on Degas in October, praised the breadth of the exhibit.

“The Harvard collection is very varied. It’s got paintings, pastels, photographs,” he said. “They’re certainly the best holdings of any university art gallery in the world.”

The museum amassed most of its Degas holdings under the tutelage of Associate Museum Director Paul J. Sachs, class of 1900, the eldest son of Samuel and Louisa Goldman Sachs. Sachs donated 22 pieces to the University, many of which will be on display at the Sackler.

“Sachs was the main promoter and was a great collector himself and persuaded other people to collect Degas,” said Cohn. “He had many students, so it wasn’t just that Harvard became a holder but also spread the missionary zeal.”

Sachs’ primary interest lay in Degas’ sketches, and indeed many of the works on display in the Sackler were rough drawings that later developed into paintings.

One of Sachs’ donations, “After the Bath, Woman Drying Herself,” has been held in a laboratory for many years, for fear that the brittle quality of the paper and the backing would react aversely outside of a controlled environment. Until Wednesday afternoon the drawing was soaking in a bath designed to humidify the paper.

PAINTINGS BY THE NUMBERS

Curators and museum planners say they are expecting the exhibition to attract over 40,000 people to the Sackler.

“‘Degas at Harvard’ is such a powerful title,” said Deputy Director of the Art Museums Richard Benefield. “There’s Degas, and then I think people associate quality with Harvard. It’s a double whammy, so to speak.”

The curators of the exhibit began planning the show roughly a year ago, prompted by the availability of space and the retirement of people familiar with Harvard’s Degas holdings, including Cohn and Jean Sutherland Boggs.

Both Cohn and Boggs, who studied under Sachs in 1944 and went on to become the first female director of the National Gallery of Canada, contributed articles to the exhibit’s catalog.

The exhibition is timed to coincide with two of the busiest months for the museums, August and October. To contain the large crowds—3,000 visitors per week are expected—the Sackler plans to cap the number of people in the exhibit at any one time at 100.

Although Harvard University Art Museums have an annual operating budget of approximately $21 million, Harvard owns or has been promised all the works the exhibit and therefore absorbed only a fraction of that cost—under $100,000, Benefield said.

—Staff writer Natalie I. Sherman can be reached at nsherman@fas.harvard.edu.