HOLLAND COTTER
Published: August 5, 2005
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.

THAT cool customer, Edgar Degas, was the supercomputer of early French modernism. With his finely tuned eye and responsive, multitasking hand, he was top-of-the-line hardware, from the time he powered up creatively in the 1850's until he gradually shut down in the years before his death in 1917 at age 83.

There was, however, a bug in the system, a glitch in his programming. Call it fear, self-doubt, inner conflict. It made him a contrary, difficult man: a sociable misanthrope, a shy egomaniac, a cosmopolitan nationalist, an egalitarian snob. As an artist, he was constantly pulled between aesthetic extremes: reaction and revolution, past and present, fantasy and life.

Of course, the conflicts are what turned him into Degas instead of some other artist: Boldini, say, or Renoir (his friends), or Toulouse-Lautrec (his adoring acolyte). All three have distinctive virtues, but also distinctive parameters. Put simplistically, Boldini is about flair, Renoir about flesh, Toulouse-Lautrec about line.

Degas is about all of that, and more. Yet even now, after all the attention paid to early modernism, his "more" remains hard to evaluate and define. That's why he still feels like a loner in the big modernist picture. And it's why his career can look strangely centerless when glimpsed as a whole, as it is in the exhibition "Degas at Harvard" at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum at Harvard University.

And a glimpse, however panoramic, is what you have here. The show occupies just three small galleries and is composed of modest-size paintings, drawings, sculptures, prints and a few late Degas photographs, including an 1895 self-portrait. All the pieces (more than 70) belong to Harvard, though they are together for the first time. Technically, they add up to an academic "teaching collection," but no other American university has a Degas collection that comes anywhere near this one, and for that matter, few public museums do.

On one level, the show is about Harvard itself as a collecting and exhibiting institution. The university's Fogg Art Museum organized a Degas show as long ago as 1911. It was a low-key affair: 12 pieces on view for 10 days. But as the only one-man Degas exhibition in any museum anywhere during the artist's lifetime, it made history.

It also sparked a local outbreak of Degas mania, encouraged by the popular Fogg curator and teacher Paul J. Sachs. Sachs was an important figure in the annals of art collecting in the United States. His Museum Course at Harvard produced generations of curators. He took modern art to the Fogg, where no living artist had ever shown. With his own money - his family founded Goldman, Sachs - he amassed an impressive personal collection and gave much of it to Harvard.

There are many Sachs pieces in the current show, culled from various Harvard repositories by two young Fogg curators, Edward Saywell and Stephan Wolohojian. Nearly every phase of Degas's career is touched on, beginning with the 1850's, when, under the spell of his idol, Jean-Dominique Ingres, he drew meticulous copies of Greek sculptures in Paris and Renaissance paintings in Italy.

Competitive, mercurial, temperamentally a nonjoiner, Degas spent less than a year in art school and was largely self-taught. Although he was plugged into the vanguard art network in Paris - Manet was a friend, as was Camille Pissarro, and later the young Gauguin - he preferred to work on his own, testing options, wrestling with choices in private.

He was devoted to the cultural past: fixed, noble, ideal. At the same time, he was drawn to the dazzlingly tawdry 19th-century present, where life and art intermingled, and all was in flux. His entire career was an effort to reconcile these allegiances, a challenge alternately irritating and stimulating.

Sometimes the classical impulse took precedence. A drawing of a young woman named Julie Burtey in the Harvard show has the boilerplate virtuosity of an academic exercise, with a pinch of charm added. A portrait sketch of his Neapolitan cousin Giulia Bellelli is also highly polished, but a lot more personable. Radiating adult hauteur, the young girl suggests a duchess in a pinafore. Ingres would have approved.

Aug. 6, 2005