Edgar Degas was not afraid. He gazed into a mirror at age twenty and saw that the world in the future would look to him for a vision of creative rectitude and spiritual exaltation. So he sat down and painted a self-portrait in which, with penetrating candor and austere resolution, he depicted a person prepared to sacrifice his life for the mere privilege of making masterpieces. This poignant but proud and uncompromising image was the first work by Degas which waited to challenge the discernment of visitors to the vast retrospective exhibition that began its world tour at the Grand Palais in Paris this spring. The self-portrait told us that we were being introduced to greatness and that we would do well to scrutinize its handiwork with a diligence as rapt and humble as the artist’s own. His courage consoled us while we reflected that its like seems to have vanished from the world.¹

Every exhibition of international magnitude nowadays is meant to be all things to all people, especially to people newly recruited to the notion that aesthetic experience gives social grace. What is consequently wanted by curators and scholars, as well as by publicists and corporate patrons, is the exhibit that’s definitive, a revelation of creative powers perceived entire for the first time, a cultural occasion long, long overdue. Degas gives everything that is wanted, gives it supremely, and gives it to such an extent that the dimensions of his own gift seem nearly limitless.