In 1903, when ballet had been a prolific subject of Edgar Degas for more than 30 years, an American collector, Louisine Havemeyer, asked him, “Why, monsieur, do you always do ballet dancers?” His quick reply was, “Because, madame, it is all that is left us of the combined movements of the Greeks.”
This already said much: In ballet he had found a modern source of classicism. Yet Degas’ body of work shows that he had found far more. His views of dance — in oil, sculpture, pastel, gouache, lithographs and other mediums — include those who aren’t dancing, those who can’t dance well yet, those who once danced but can do so no longer and a great many of those who can but happen not to be doing so just now.
We need not argue about whether Degas (1834-1917) surpasses Matisse — some of Degas’ late paintings may well point the way to Matisse’s bold Modernist masterpiece The Dance — or Picasso, who designed ballets and drew dancers. But certainly no great artist has ever returned to the mechanics and sociology of the professional dancer’s art more often than Degas or has understood them so well. And no artist has ever depicted ballet more truthfully — or more variously.
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This fall brings the opportunity to home in on his ballet work with two different exhibitions. At the Phillips Collection in Washington, Degas’ Dancers at the Barre: Point and Counterpoint (Oct. 1 to Jan. 8) concentrates on the backstage life to which Degas had access. Centering on one late painting, Dancers at the Bar (around 1900), and showing his treatments of ballet as successive variations on certain themes, the exhibition emphasizes his process: the work that this painter of workers put into his art.
At the Royal Academy of Arts in London, Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement (Sept. 17 to Dec. 11) focuses on his relentless scrutiny of the human body in motion, not only in his painting, prints and sculpture but in the context of the photography of the late 19th century (including some images by Degas himself) and early film technology (in which he was keenly interested).
Rewarding as both these shows will surely be, no one or two exhibitions can contain the ramifications of Degas’ ballet work. There is no better way to rethink him and his views of ballet than to travel the US; they abound in its many galleries. Innumerable as his dancers seem, each adds to our sense both of Degas and of dance.
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Degas made important paintings of ballet in the 1860s, but it was around 1870 when dance, especially in its classrooms, became one of his recurrent and most popular subjects. The large Picturing Movement show traces his progress from what the organizers call “the documentary mode of the early 1870s to the sensuous expressiveness of his later years.” In old age Degas went less often to performances; he focused more on the dancers themselves. Yet his art did not shift over the years as much as refine and concentrate; he returned to old themes in new treatments. Without being less realistic or hard working, his dancers increasingly became emblems of vitality and pure form.
Keep looking at his works, early or late, and they reveal just how much his mind relished complexity. Theatergoers detest restricted views; Degas, when painting, loved them. And whereas balletomanes deplore alternative renditions of the same step, Degas relished them too.
Even in rehearsal scenes he depicted walls, constrictions, objects and people interrupting his view of dance. The foreground of The Dance Class (1873) — one of the works in the Phillips exhibition — features a spiral staircase (with dancers descending it), dancers stretching and old ladies in street clothes. (Are they dressers?) The whole painting glows — you see at once why his dance pictures soon became a large part of his international fame — and yet the thought within it is multilayered.
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The two dancers in the near foreground, on the right, are neither dancing nor watching the dance. One of them is seated; Degas focuses on her fully turned-out feet, attending to the sheer physical oddity of turnout itself. Near the center of the picture two women are each poised on point. But, as always, Degas captures the different emphasis with the same pose. Though they’re the ones dancing, they aren’t bathed in the warm light that catches the dancers at the back of the studio, and their figures are less distinct than the legs and feet of the women who are descending the stairs on the left. If any teacher is in the room, he’s out of sight.
As the painting suggests, Degas was a realist who was also subtle — guarded even — about how reality should be rendered. He once said that, were he to start an art school, it would be in six floors of a single house. Beginners would start with the model on the top floor. As students developed, they would move down, floor by floor, until they reached street level; to consult the original model, they would have to climb the stairs each time. Art for him was not just about memory, it was a Platonic conception of different layers of being.
“Life isn’t a rehearsal,” we often hear. Degas, by contrast, found profound meaning in a life that is almost all rehearsal. In several pictures — among those titled The Dance Class, The Dance Lesson or Dancers, for instance — nobody is dancing at all. Instead, he often chose to lay ballet bare as an art form largely defined by preparation, waiting, recovery, fatigue and distraction. In The Dance Lesson (1879), to be shown in the London exhibition, nobody is teaching, and it’s not clear if anyone is learning, though two or more dancers in the mid-distance are working on classical positions by themselves. Few of his backstage dancers suggest that practice makes perfect; many of them are imperfect and not practicing.
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Ballet is an art of the ideal, and yet Degas continually shows the human effort involved in achieving that ideal. He shows his dancing women not as princesses but as workers, and many of them are either contorted or weary. It is also an art of illusion, but he loved to offset its feminine dream world with the reality of the men playing in the orchestra pit, with skewed angles that expose how two-dimensional the painted scenery is, and with demonstrations that some of these delectable female visions were thoroughly disenchanted.
It’s their truthfulness rather than loveliness that makes them speak directly to us.
Yet, even though many of his dancers aren’t dancing, his eye never failed to respond to dance itself. He appreciated it as both science and art: Acutely he revealed both fine details of technique and the transcendent beauties of physical harmony.
Throughout his works he kept analyzing the way in which color, form, surface, projection and distance affect the eye in dance. (In some paintings the dance is a blur beside the concrete realities of the theater or classroom around it.)
He annoyed some of his Impressionist contemporaries by insisting that he was a realist (Renoir thought he was mistaken), and his art keeps asking: How many different kinds of reality are there?
His mind is at its most dazzlingly intricate in his 1870s classroom panoramas, several of which are in the Washington show. Dance, for most of those within his view, is in the past or future tense (the master who can no longer dance, the student who is learning how) or in the conditional mood (the practitioners who could if only they would). To add to the layering, mirrors in some of his classroom views (like those in the Metropolitan Museum’s Degas collection) show apparently impossible reflections. Degas, it seems, is playing games.
Yet even if you focus only on his portrayals of those who are actually dancing, there’s more than enough to see. For him a woman balancing on one leg is rich fare. In several paintings she is balancing on one point, and his eye alights precisely in each case on just where her waist, her arms, her shoulders, her head and her raised leg are placed. In another painting, where the dancer is on flat foot, he shows admiringly how fully turned out her supporting leg is. As with no other artist, it’s as if he were inside her body, so full is his appreciation of ballet-trained musculature.
“To think that we’re living in an age that has produced a sculptor to equal the ancients!” Renoir once exclaimed. Listening, the art dealer Ambroise Vollard assumed he meant Rodin. But Renoir promptly replied: “Who said anything about Rodin? Why, Degas is the greatest living sculptor!”
Just so: Degas’ sculptures of dancers in motion — never displayed in his lifetime — are among his greatest achievements. I never tire of looking at how he fashions apparently nude dancers in arabesque. Very firmly he shapes details of a period style of dancing. The sloping downward and forward line that Degas’ dancers maintain from toe to hand in arabesque penchee is a single absorbing diagonal. Nobody in ballet today holds her torso that way; some refuse to believe anyone ever did. Yet you’d better believe him. He sculptured that position with three different models (each with her own different stylistic or physical imperfections).
Though most of his dancers are anonymous, the costumes and scenery he painted have been identified in the Paris Opera repertory down to minute details, and we know the names of several of those he depicted, ranging from the old ballet teacher Jules Perrot to the student who Degas in 1881 immortalized in sculpture as The Little 14-Year-Old Dancer, Marie van Goethem.
In all his portrayals in whatever medium, Degas returns again and again to the tension that preoccupied the ancient Greeks, and which has preoccupied ballet since the Baroque era: How can the ideal and real coexist? The immortal and the mortal? The admirable and the fallible? Sometimes Degas juxtaposes them all within the panoply of a single classroom. At other times, with mastery as much psychological as anatomical, he shows them all in the body of a single anonymous dancer.
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