Exceptional Collection of Edgar Degas Masterworks to be Presented at Harvard University Art Museums August 1–November 27, 2005

February 16, 2005

This August, the Harvard University Art Museums will present Degas at Harvard, an exhibition examining Harvard University’s comprehensive holdings by Edgar Degas—one of the most important collections of the artist’s work in the United States. The exhibition will draw together more than 60 works from the Fogg’s own collection, together with promised gifts and significant works from The Dumbarton Oaks and Research Library and Collection in Washington, D.C., and The Houghton Library at Harvard. The exhibition, which is organized by the Fogg Art Museum, will include paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints, and photographs. Degas at Harvard will be on view at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum from August 1 to November 27, 2005.

In 1911, the Fogg was the first museum to mount an exhibition of works by Degas and was the only museum to do so during the artist’s lifetime. This exhibition explores the range and depth of Degas’ artistic innovation, and Harvard’s pivotal role in fostering understanding and scholarship of his works through the commitment of its curators, collectors, and the generations of scholars who have worked with the collection at the Fogg. Among the works featured in the exhibition will be the bronze sculpture Little Dancer, Fourteen Years Old (1880), the pastel Chanteuse de Café (c. 1878), and the photograph Untitled (Self-Portrait in his Library) (c. 1895).

Degas at Harvard is curated by Edward Saywell, Charles C. Cunningham, Sr., Curatorial Associate in Drawings and Stephan Wolohojian, Curator, Department of Paintings, Sculpture and Decorative Arts. The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue with essays by Harvard curator Marjorie Benedict Cohn and Jean Sutherland Boggs, an independent scholar and former pupil of former Fogg director Paul Sachs, and a Leventritt lecture series involving many of today’s leading Degas scholars.