“’Degas and the Nude’ will be a revelation for our visitors,” says Malcolm Rogers, director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. “It will offer a number of surprises—for instance, we’ll reunite several of Degas’s black-and-white monotypes with the corresponding pastel ‘twins’ for the first time since they left the artist’s studio. Visitors will see the progression of his nudes and the very heart of Degas’s fascination with the body and its range of emotion and movement. He pursued that fascination in portraits, and above all in images of dancers, but in the nude we see the body in its purest form, through Degas’s eye and imagination.”

The exhibition spans the artist’s career, from early academic nudes, to the mid-career experiments with pastels and monotypes, to the bathing scenes and interiors that typify his late work. It concludes with a suite of paintings that puts those late drawings in context, alongside Bonnard, Matisse, and Picasso. The MFA is the only United States venue for the exhibition, after which it travels to the Musée d’Orsay.

“Degas and the Nude” runs through February 5, 2012 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 465 Huntington Avenue, 617-267-9300, mfa.org.

Franklin Einspruch is an artist and writer.