Degas defies limits in “Dancers at the Barre”

It’s the fall of Degas. On Saturday, the Phillips Collection will open a show called “Degas’s Dancers at the Barre: Point and Counterpoint,” the first exhibition in Washington to focus on the artist’s dancers in 25 years. Last week, London’s Royal Academy of Art opened another Degas dance show, “Degas and the Ballet.” And Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts is turning its gaze to another aspect of the artist’s depiction of the female form in the show “Degas and the Nude,” which will open next week.

For some artists, three simultaneous shows would be overkill. In Degas’s case, it’s a fitting tribute to an artist who continually repeated himself, exploring figures in the same poses over and over, trying out different media, different angles, different combinations of line and color. Degas made more than 1,500 drawings, paintings and sculptures of dancers from the 1870s onward: pastels, oils, monotypes, wax models that were later, mostly after his death in 1917, cast in bronze. There’s plenty of material to go around.

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The Phillips show centers on its own painting, “Dancers at the Barre,” newly restored and scientifically analyzed to reveal layers of underpainting demonstrating the care, the repetition, the echolalia of this thoughtful, restless, obsessive artist. The carefully balanced image has become iconic: two women who seem to be one organism, their torsos and limbs emerging from a single blue semicircle of diaphanous skirt, against a wall of contrasting orange. Degas’s visual dance is based on opposing colors, counterbalanced figures, gravity and weightlessness. In his ballet works, the limbs are the defining features, strong and modeled and earthly, while the skirts seem to float, clouds defying the limits of the body.

Degas defies those limits, too. In sketch after sketch, he works to establish the vertical pole of a dancer’s body, the central axis of the weight-bearing leg. A full-size study for “Dancers at the Barre,” on loan from Ottawa’s National Gallery, shows a supreme awareness of the anatomical forms beneath the skirts; a nude pastel study from the 1890s tries another take on the same composition. And X-rays reveal that the painting itself, begun in the early 1880s, was worked and reworked; the Phillips displays the underpinnings in an adjacent room in a series of superimpositions that reveal a whole cloud of phantom limbs beneath the bodies, like evocations of movement.

The process was one of increasing abstraction. At some point in the work — Degas continued to return to the canvas for 20 years — he moved the lower foot and leg of the nearer, right-hand dancer, elongating them beyond realism, giving them a gestural truth instead of a literal one. The dancer takes flight. Poised on a stalk of leg that would fit no human body, she is freed from the laws of gravity.

Degas’s images of dancers are about the making of art. The idea is implicit in the drawings and sketches, and explicit in paintings such as “The Ballet Rehearsal,” which shows dancers at rest, dancers practicing — dancers who are about to make, or have just made, dance, but who are not formally doing so at the moment.