Edgar Degas will always be one of the most enigmatic of artists, but if you haven’t managed to bring him into sharper focus over the past decade, you haven’t been paying attention. On this side of the Atlantic alone, starting with a full-scale retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum in 1988, Degas has starred or played a leading role in a series of provocative exhibitions clarifying particular aspects of his evolution and setting him in context. Think of the revealing show of Degas’s little known landscapes, the survey of the early years of Degas and his colleagues, “Origins of Impressionism,” or the celebration of Degas as a collector, all seen at the Met over the last five years. Think, too, of the 1996 examination of Degas’s late work at the Art Institute of Chicago. And this spring and summer, if you went to Williamstown or to Washington, D.C., you could deepen your understanding of two more of this absorbing and appar ...

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