Lot Essay
No subject attracted Degas more profoundly than the ballet. It has been estimated that he made approximately 1500 drawings, paintings, pastels and sculptures of dancers, more than half his total output. As Richard Thomson has written:
Degas's motives for this obsession, which he sustained well into the twentieth century, were multifarious. He would claim that his interest was in movement and in drawing: "The dancer is only a pretext for drawing." Apt as this justification is for the images of the last twenty years of his career, his initial stimuli in the 1870s involved other factors... The ballet encapsulates a rich complex of tensions, setting the apparent ease of performance against the actual agony of effort, allowing for ostensibly naturalistic images of people submitting their bodies to a confected discipline, and given the mores of the Opera in Third Republic Paris, providing a piquant combination of art on stage and vice backstage (R. Thomson, The Private Degas, London, 1987, p. 46).
Degas was close friends with Paul Valry, the great French poet, who explained Degas's attraction to the ballet, writing:
In ballet there are moments of immobility when the grouping of the whole ensemble offers a picture, stilled but not permanent, a complex of human bodies suddenly arrested in their postures, giving a singular emphasis to the impression of flux. The dancers are as if transfixed in poses very remote from those in which the human physique can maintain itself by its own strength... In the ordinary, everyday world, physical acts are merely transitional, all the energy we sometimes put into them being used simply to finish some task, without any renewal or regeneration of itself by means of physical exaltation... What could be more improbable than a form of discourse which could charm and dazzle the mind with each entry of the images and ideas it prompted? (P. Valry, Degas, Manet, Morisot, Princeton, New Jersey, 1960, pp. 16-17)
From early in his career, a principal obsession of Degas was the depiction of ballet dancers in the rehearsal room, they are shown relaxing between exercises, and caught in odd poses--half awkward, half graceful--as they stretch, adjust a strap or slipper, or perform other casual and unguarded movements. Degas seems to have been attracted both by the intimacy of these moments and by their transitional character. Moreover, Degas appears to have identified with the dedication of the dancers, who, in the pursuit of aesthetic perfection, repeated their exercises over and over again even to the point of utter physical exhaustion. In the same manner, Degas, the most obsessive of all perfectionists in nineteenth-century art, meticulously perfected his technique as a draftsman and painter, and thoroughly explored motifs and poses until he felt he had exhausted all their artistic possibilities. As Thomson has written:
Degas seems to have admired the dancers for their submission to the private, rigorous discipline that was the essential preparation for the seemingly effortless grace displayed to the public in the ballet. The dance rehearsal formed a sympathetic parallel to his own beliefs as an artist, founded on constant study of the paradigms and rudiments of his own art. (R. Thompson, op. cit., pp. 47-48).
In the present work Degas combined several classic motifs from his repertoire of ballet imagery. For example, at the left are two dancers standing in such close proximity that their poses suggest continuity of motion. Degas repeatedly painted and drew ballet dancers standing close together in related or serial poses whose interrelation suggests different stages of one integral motion; such groupings of figures appear everywhere in his later oeuvre. Likewise, the pose of the dancer bending over at the right is one that Degas obsessively studied; variations of it, in every medium, are common throughout his career. The chair in the immediate foreground is another motif that Degas returned to obsessively. Indeed, in one of his very first paintings of a ballet rehearsal, he included a similar chair, turned in almost exactly the same direction and placed in nearly the same location (fig. 1). In this early painting, the seat of the chair is covered with a fan and a chiffon, rather than a ballet slipper. But Degas also used the motif of ballet slippers in many other paintings (fig. 2).
(fig. 1) Edgar Degas, Le foyer, 1872
Muse d'Orsay, Paris
(fig. 2) Edgar Degas, Ecole de danse, 1873
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Degas's motives for this obsession, which he sustained well into the twentieth century, were multifarious. He would claim that his interest was in movement and in drawing: "The dancer is only a pretext for drawing." Apt as this justification is for the images of the last twenty years of his career, his initial stimuli in the 1870s involved other factors... The ballet encapsulates a rich complex of tensions, setting the apparent ease of performance against the actual agony of effort, allowing for ostensibly naturalistic images of people submitting their bodies to a confected discipline, and given the mores of the Opera in Third Republic Paris, providing a piquant combination of art on stage and vice backstage (R. Thomson, The Private Degas, London, 1987, p. 46).
Degas was close friends with Paul Valry, the great French poet, who explained Degas's attraction to the ballet, writing:
In ballet there are moments of immobility when the grouping of the whole ensemble offers a picture, stilled but not permanent, a complex of human bodies suddenly arrested in their postures, giving a singular emphasis to the impression of flux. The dancers are as if transfixed in poses very remote from those in which the human physique can maintain itself by its own strength... In the ordinary, everyday world, physical acts are merely transitional, all the energy we sometimes put into them being used simply to finish some task, without any renewal or regeneration of itself by means of physical exaltation... What could be more improbable than a form of discourse which could charm and dazzle the mind with each entry of the images and ideas it prompted? (P. Valry, Degas, Manet, Morisot, Princeton, New Jersey, 1960, pp. 16-17)
From early in his career, a principal obsession of Degas was the depiction of ballet dancers in the rehearsal room, they are shown relaxing between exercises, and caught in odd poses--half awkward, half graceful--as they stretch, adjust a strap or slipper, or perform other casual and unguarded movements. Degas seems to have been attracted both by the intimacy of these moments and by their transitional character. Moreover, Degas appears to have identified with the dedication of the dancers, who, in the pursuit of aesthetic perfection, repeated their exercises over and over again even to the point of utter physical exhaustion. In the same manner, Degas, the most obsessive of all perfectionists in nineteenth-century art, meticulously perfected his technique as a draftsman and painter, and thoroughly explored motifs and poses until he felt he had exhausted all their artistic possibilities. As Thomson has written:
Degas seems to have admired the dancers for their submission to the private, rigorous discipline that was the essential preparation for the seemingly effortless grace displayed to the public in the ballet. The dance rehearsal formed a sympathetic parallel to his own beliefs as an artist, founded on constant study of the paradigms and rudiments of his own art. (R. Thompson, op. cit., pp. 47-48).
In the present work Degas combined several classic motifs from his repertoire of ballet imagery. For example, at the left are two dancers standing in such close proximity that their poses suggest continuity of motion. Degas repeatedly painted and drew ballet dancers standing close together in related or serial poses whose interrelation suggests different stages of one integral motion; such groupings of figures appear everywhere in his later oeuvre. Likewise, the pose of the dancer bending over at the right is one that Degas obsessively studied; variations of it, in every medium, are common throughout his career. The chair in the immediate foreground is another motif that Degas returned to obsessively. Indeed, in one of his very first paintings of a ballet rehearsal, he included a similar chair, turned in almost exactly the same direction and placed in nearly the same location (fig. 1). In this early painting, the seat of the chair is covered with a fan and a chiffon, rather than a ballet slipper. But Degas also used the motif of ballet slippers in many other paintings (fig. 2).
(fig. 1) Edgar Degas, Le foyer, 1872
Muse d'Orsay, Paris
(fig. 2) Edgar Degas, Ecole de danse, 1873
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.