Edgar Degas will always be one of the most enigmatic of
artists, but if you haven’t managed to bring him into sharper
focus over the past decade, you haven’t been paying attention.
On this side of the Atlantic alone, starting with a full-scale
retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum in 1988, Degas has
starred or played a leading role in a series of provocative
exhibitions clarifying particular aspects of his evolution and
setting him in context. Think of the revealing show of Degas’s
little known landscapes, the survey of the early years of Degas
and his colleagues, “Origins of Impressionism,” or the
celebration of Degas as a collector, all seen at the Met over the last five years.
Think, too, of the 1996 examination of Degas’s late work at the
Art Institute of Chicago. And this spring and summer,
if you
went to Williamstown or to Washington, D.C., you could
deepen your understanding of two more of this absorbing and
apparently inexhaustible artist’s continuing obsessions: dancers
and horses.

The Williamstown show, “Degas and the Little Dancer” at the Sterling
and Francine Clark Art Institute,
revolved around one of Degas’s most loved and, as it turns out,
misunderstood works, Little Dancer Aged Fourteen.[1]
In Degas’s own time, as today, this curious, unforgettable figure
was among his best known works. It was the only one of his
sculptures exhibited in his lifetime, and, after his death, more
than twenty bronze casts were made after the original wax. But