“Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty” was organized by Jodi Hauptman, senior curator of drawings and prints, with Karl Buchberg, senior conservator, and Heidi Hirschl, a curatorial assistant. It presents 120 monotypes and nearly 60 related prints, paintings, pastels, charcoal drawings and photos. Three sketchbooks on view can also can be flipped through digitally and underscore Degas’s keen attention to both urban life and the body.  Among print mediums, and perhaps all works on paper, monotypes were and remain hotbeds of spontaneity and improvisation. They’re made by composing in ink — with brush, rag, finger, fingernail, stick, just about anything — on a blank plate that is then layered with a damp sheet of paper and run through a printing press. Speed is of the essence. The first impression from each plate is unique; if more versions — cognates — are pulled from the same inking, they will be pale ghosts. Degas’s smaller monotypes can paradoxically be aerial close-ups: We might almost be riding the backs of his hands as they flit across a plate, revising, adding, wiping away while the ink is still wet and printable.  The exhibition begins with two etchings from Degas’s youth: an elegantly solemn self-portrait (seen in two states) and an increasingly shadowy portrayal of the engraver Joseph Tourny (three states). Both reflect attention to Ingres and especially Rembrandt.  But Degas learned the monotype technique around 1876 from his artist friend Ludovic Napoléon Lepic. After that, what the poet Stéphane Mallarmé referred to as the “strange new beauty” of Degas’s monotypes even destabilizes his more conventional etchings, etching-aquatints and lithographs.  Things become increasingly unorthodox and fragmentary as prints devoted to the spectacle of the cafe, concert hall and theater progress along one wall. Images wash out as if lighted by a flash bulb. Space is overtaken by intersecting, nearly monumental, geometries in “At the Café des Ambassadeurs” and its mate, “At the Ambassadeurs.” “Actresses in Their Dressing Rooms,” an etching-aquatint may prompt a double take: Its four vertical sections and truncated figures and shadows uncannily evoke Jasper Johns’s “Seasons” paintings. “Mademoiselle Bécat at the Ambassadeurs,” a lithograph from around 1875, benefits from lights and darks of the monotypes, with the chanteuse illuminated from below.  Lepice, a Rembrandt devotee, used plates already etched with images for his monotypes; six examples in the show were made atop a Dutch-looking shoreline scene supplemented by additions of trees, clouds or undergrowth. But Degas immediately realized that a blank plate offered complete freedom to crossbreed print and drawing methods.  He was probably the first artist to enhance the pale cognates with pastel. This yielded a series of jewel-like images of singers that surprise us at the beginning of the second gallery. There are clusters of works only glimpsed in previous Degas surveys. One gallery holds 27 landscapes from the early ’90s, in pigmented oil paint instead of ink — another innovation — which created a greater element of chance. Some are tightened up with additions of pastel; others are visionary stains, all but abstract areas of tinted texture and atmosphere that might have been made this year.  Another gallery is devoted to Degas’s “dark field” monotypes, made by covering a plate with ink and brushing, wiping or scratching it away, creating a motif by subtraction. A few expert wipes, and the naked, often contorted, bodies of women bathing or reading or going to bed emerge from the darkness. The intense privacy of female solitude acquires a macabre, yet formal power. (Goya’s “Black Paintings” come to mind.)  The show concludes with a series of magnificent late bathers and dancers whose saturated colors and rough textures expand the freedoms of monotypes into much larger works in oil or pastel. Here, Degas sometimes finished the figures with broken black outlines, as if to recall the monotypes.  “A Strange New Beauty” brings a new logic and coherence to Degas’s experimentation. It also reveals his monotypes as early signs of the 20th-century’s waves of nonacademic figuration — from the Fauves to German Expressionists to American artists like David Park — and abstraction itself. Most of all, it makes the past feel alive and useful, perhaps the most you can ask of any historical show.  ­“Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty” is on view March 26 through July 24 at the Museum of Modern Art; 212-708-9400, moma.org.  A version of this review appears in print on March 25, 2016, on page C17 of the New York edition with the headline: The Experimental Paper Chase of Degas. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Nearly 100 years after the revered artist’s death, he’s getting his first solo show at the Museum of Modern Art — focusing on experimental works on paper.