Abstract thoughts Edgar Degas at Harvard BY JON GARELICK

"Degas at Harvard"

Arthur M. Sackler Museum | 485 Broadway, Cambridge | Through November 27

It’s difficult to accept the purely abstract in the visual arts without some narrative armature to hang it all on — the psychologizing of portraiture, and the "stories" behind great paintings, whether of the subject matter or of the artist. Jacques-Louis David’s 1784 painting The Oath of the Horatii is both a depiction of a story from Roman historian Livy and a precursor to the French Revolution. And it’s considered perverse for the artist to distance himself from audience and subject matter with a title like Arrangement in Grey and Black when everybody knows this severe, dignified portrait is "Whistler’s Mother."

The Harvard Art Museums have collected their impressive holdings of a beloved "representational" artist for a beautiful non-blockbuster of a show, "Degas at Harvard," and it throws all the old questions about form versus content and representation versus abstraction into high relief. Degas (1834–1917) was a couple of years younger than Manet, the same age as Whistler (proto-Impressionists both), and a half-dozen years younger than Monet and Renoir. He was a transitional figure who had studied with Ingres and was with the Impressionists but not of them. Like them, he favored homely, intimate subject matter over the heroic, and he abjured the "academic" style of the salons in favor of radical, fleeting "impressions" of everyday life.

Historical paintings provide context with subject matter like the coronation of Napoleon, the death of Marat, or Washington crossing the Delaware. But what to make of the common laundress or the anonymous café singer? That’s not to discount psychology in Degas’s celebrated portraits. There’s the stern set of the jaw and sidelong stare of Alice Villette, a friend who sat for the artist and who now looks at us from the cover of the Harvard catalogue. There’s the dreamy regard of Woman Seated Beside a Vase of Flowers, hand on chin, admired by the late Harvard curator Paul Sachs (a central benefactor to the collection) for "those qualities of French charm and repose which set their stamp of time, place, station and nationality upon the sitter."

But what of all the nude studies of women toweling off after their baths? The wall text for the pastel After the Bath, Woman with a Towel describes the model as "turned modestly away from us," but the sitter’s modesty seems secondary to the oil-like texture of the pastel (as the wall text points out) and the vibrant abstraction of its color patterns. As for Mme Villette, she competes with the view out Degas’s large studio window directly behind her, just as the seated woman, seen at Harvard in a beautifully rendered line drawing, occupies less than a third of the finished canvas she shares with that enormous vase of flowers.

Curators Edward Saywell and Stephan Wolohojian have divided about 70 Degas paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, and photographs among three rooms at the Sackler — roughly by chronology, medium, and subject matter. The first room concentrates on early studies from old masters, and horse racing, the second on ballet (including the great sculpture Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen), the last on women at their baths.

At the press preview, Saywell pointed out that the show was not a blockbuster because of its modest size and because not "every single piece is a masterpiece." But the cumulative effect of the show lies in its quiet power. Its nourishing but not overwhelming size allows you to take in everything, and to take your time. So the "conversations" that Saywell hopes for among related pieces begin to resonate. You get to see Degas’s obsession with revision, his returning again and again to the same subject matter in various media, and how even the simplest "study" in pencil or charcoal has the authority to dominate a room.

Take After the Bath, Woman Drying Herself, which, executed in charcoal on now-yellowed tracing paper, hasn’t been out of storage in more than 40 years and represents a heroic restoration effort by the Harvard conservators, who had to separate the brittle cardboard backing from the work’s equally brittle paper support. The largest such piece in the show (97.8 by 90.1 cm), it’s a knockout. We face the bather head-on (rather than at one of Degas’s odd angles from above) as she sits with her back turned toward us, left arm raised as she reaches under it with a towel in her right hand. Here is the economy of means — a variety of soft shading, and rapid, free strokes — suggesting space, movement, volume, mass. Look at how the blank, unmarked lower back and buttocks take shape because of the delicate use of shading on the upper back and a simple, heavy line where belly meets thigh. There’s also a suggestion of another, later master draftsman in the energized, De Kooning–like freedom of the squiggly line of loose hair or ribbon on top of her head.

The division between "studies" and finished works is often blurred. In the oil painting The Rehearsal, a drawn-on grid is still visible in the central ballerina. But here again are Degas’s signature touches: the use of diagonals to divide and energize the composition: the soft light-into-shadow entering the rehearsal room from three tall windows; the asymmetry that leaves a large blank space in the foreground of the canvas and puts a seated violinist almost out of view at the left edge like a dark mass. It’s a "dull" palette of ochers, greens, grays, browns, and black, with just the slightest daub of pink on the tutu of that central ballerina carrying your eye from the violinist through the line of dancers and to the window.

The wall text tells us that in earlier incarnations, a staircase took up the now blank space of floor. It’s the play of light across that floor, of course, that helps make this a credible interior. The "personality’ of the dancers is not individuated in their expressions, and the "story" is generic ("the rehearsal"), but the intimacy and the reality of that space could not be more apparent.

In Cotton Merchants in New Orleans, Degas isn’t interested so much in the faces of the three figures in that room as he is in the individual gestures and shapes that will bring the painted canvas to life. A figure entering at right is indicated with just a few lines, but the top hat of one merchant bent over the cotton bin has force as a black, highlighted cylindrical shape. The intensity of his gaze comes through in the tilt of his hat as he looks down, in the flat white of his shirt front, and at the placement of his hands atop the cotton. The cotton itself, thrusting diagonally into the painting, is depicted in loving swirls of paint.

The tension between abstraction and representation comes to a head in the pastel Chanteuse de Café (also called Singer with a Glove). What’s more important here — the anonymous singer’s face or her hand, specifically the black glove, cutting diagonally across the image and thrust at you? The tension is created in part by the color, the shape, and the line of that glove juxtaposed with the pinkness of her face and dress, the tufted fur fringe of her collar and sleeve, and the wet lips of that wide-open mouth. Her head tilted back, the singer’s eyes are almost unfocused. The wall text quotes a letter in which Degas urged a friend to go see another such café singer. "She opens her large mouth and there emerges the most roughly, the most delicately, the most spiritually tender voice imaginable." Music, another abstraction. More than a distinct personality, Degas has captured the look of the sound.