After the Impressionists, Behold the Edgy Degas

Think Degas, and chances are you think Impressionism. And why not? The upward trajectory of the Frenchman’s career as a painter is nearly coincident with the rising fortunes of Impressionist art.

Born in 1834, Edgar Degas was studying art in Paris in the 1860s, the formative years of what would soon come to be called Impressionist painting and, not incidentally, of his own developing work. His severely classical style, guided by a reverence for Ingres, was beginning to loosen up.

Increasingly dissatisfied with the sterility he found in traditional academic practice, Degas formally allied himself with the newly emergent band of Impressionist artists. The affiliation was established more in solidarity with their open hostility to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts (where Degas had studied) than from any firm commitment to a group style or theory. Although most of the Impressionists’ shows were unsuccessful, he exhibited with them regularly, up to and including the eighth and last Impressionist exhibition, held in 1886.

Currently at the Art Institute of Chicago, the thoughtful and engrossing exhibition “Degas: Beyond Impressionism” opens with a room devoted to about 20 paintings, drawings and pastels made between 1855 and that final Impressionist show. Portraits, racetrack images of jockeys on horseback and scenes of the ballet show us the Degas we immediately conjure in our mind’s eye when his name is spoken.

But this room is only a prelude. It creates a familiar if essential context for what comes next. As the show’s title announces, we are about to follow Degas “beyond” his association with Impressionism--beyond his perceived affinities with artists like Monet, Pissarro and Cassat.

It’s quite a trip. Curators Douglas W. Druick (of the Art Institute), John Leighton (of London’s National Gallery, where the show was seen last summer, its only other venue) and Richard Kendall (an independent scholar and Degas authority, who wrote the exhibition’s first-rate catalog) proceed to show us a painter who suddenly starts to seem remote. An edginess that’s only hinted at in the first gallery comes to the foreground in the Degas who emerged “after Impressionism”--an impatience and even irritability that is quite unlike anything you casually associate with his art.

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Take the oil painting “After the Bath, Woman Drying Herself” (1894-1896). A faceless nude, her head simply a curving black contour line, assumes a clumsy, unnatural stretching pose over the back of a day bed, as her left hand awkwardly reaches around to wipe a towel across her elongated torso. The scene is dominated by a searing, nearly monochromatic red, with crimson reflections tamping down the contrast of the woman’s flesh and the large white sheet thrown across the chaise.

Degas’ composition, which elaborates a photographic study by the artist now in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, is exceedingly odd. The painting is large, divided into four nearly equal quadrants that are articulated by the floor and walls, yet it’s anything but harmonious and stable.

The straining figure is crowded to one side, in stark opposition to the seeming emptiness of the room; the bathtub is the only other looming presence, off in a far corner. The model’s splayed elbows and knees nearly pull the image apart at its pictorial seams, while the almost Venetian redness cranks up the visual heat.

“After the Bath, Woman Drying Herself” is both luxurious and alarming. Plainly, something is afoot. Impressionist paintings can be described in many ways, but alarming isn’t usually one of them.

Bathers were a common enough subject in official French art of the day--partly as a showy symbol of erudite acquaintance with an artistic tradition derived from antiquity, partly as a cheap excuse for a straight male establishment to ogle female flesh. The abundance of bathers in Degas’ later work recalls both his early passion for Ingres and his deep desire to remake a classical image in a thoroughly anti-academic way.

In addition to executing some 200 pastels on the subject, Degas painted, drew or molded in clay or wax scores of images of bathers in his later years. The selection of about two dozen in the show covers a vast range--from erotic to remote, peaceful to intense, austere to elaborate, eccentric to mundane.

And alarming. The exhibition beautifully demonstrates how the artist used the bather, along with the related and more familiar Degas subject of the dancer, to chart his experience of the disequilibrium of modern life. To paint a red-hot image of a bather whose contorted pose is more like that of someone who has just been shot and gravely wounded than like one who is merely attending to her daily toilette is to enter a radically destabilized world.

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Degas lived until 1917. “Degas: Beyond Impressionism” means to take our perception of his art beyond the common interest in it as quintessential for late-19th century France. Instead, the work he produced in the 1890s and 1900s is dramatically repositioned: It’s proposed as a critical foundation for early 20th century art--for the stirrings of Cubist and Expressionist painting, which marked a huge rupture.

The argument is thoroughly convincing. It’s worth noting that part of the reason for the success is that the curatorial team has deftly practiced what sometimes seems like a disappearing art--namely, letting art itself tell its tale. Unlike in most large museum exhibitions today, in these galleries you’ll find hardly a wall text and no fashionable timeline of events in the life of Degas, Paris or European culture is anywhere to be seen.

An audio-taped tour is available for visitors, and so is a well-written brochure keyed to each room in the show. The curators are not opposed to a contextual understanding of Degas’ art.

To the contrary. The galleries are reserved for Degas’ pastels, paintings and sculptures, which are illuminated through curatorial selection, savvy juxtaposition and insightful display. The installation helps you read art, rather than read about art.

Galleries are devoted to Degas’ practice of developing pictures in sequence, to the complex role that sculpture came to play in his working method and to such highly specific subject matter as women combing their hair. Together they make for an exhibition that is likely to definitively alter the way we’ll think about Degas’ work from this moment on.

* “Degas: Beyond Impressionism,” Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Ave., (312) 443-3600, through Jan. 5. Open daily.