What happens in Degas stays in Degas!

Just spent a foot-tiring but soul-stirring morning and afternoon hoofing through the Museum of Fine Art's big new Degas exhibit, Degas and the Nude, co-hosted with the Musee d'Orsay, my third favorite museum in France.If you're like me and think of Degas as a kind of refined guy, pretty ballerinas in their wired-on tutus, you could be in for a surprise.  A lot of the 140 pictures and sculptures are pretty raunchy.  Lucian Freud said of them “You might say that Degas’s people were more naked than nude — that he was making portraits of naked people.”A more disapproving critic said he made the women look like animals, which I think is close to truth, but it's objectivity more than a moral or esthetic attitude.  He did notice that they had vaginas, like more than half  the human race, and even pubic hair.   Nothing that would raise eyebrows in most church groups nowadays.  The only shocking thing about Degas to today's sensibilities is that he was always surrounded by naked women, but was evidently celibate.Gay and Judith and I enjoyed the show a lot, and had a nice but expensive lunch at the restaurant.  Actually, there's a big new dining area in the new building, but it looks bright and loud, and we didn't mind paying extra for quiet and subdued light.We were there mainly for the Degas, but saw an arresting new thing in the Egyptology section on the way . . . in 1927 a Harvard - MFA expedition found an untouched skeleton in a tomb, with a desiccated body covered with beads in an odd pattern.  After some study and analysis they figured out that the beads were the remains of a complex garment, a dress or shift that was carefully fashioned of beads and thread -- and of course the threads had long since gone the way of Tut's tutu.   They painstakingly reassembled it and draped it over an abstract plastic model, gorgeous.Joe