In the accompanying catalog, guest curators and art historians Richard Kendall, a Degas authority, and Jill DeVonyar, a former ballet dancer, trace Degas’s life backstage based on their research in the records of the Paris Opéra Ballet.
Now Degas’s pencil and chalk drawings, monotype prints and pastels, oil paintings and sculptures of ballerinas have been gathered from museums and private collections around the world for an exhibition entitled “Degas and the Dance.” The show was organized by the American Federation of Arts along with the Detroit Institute of the Arts, where it was first shown last year, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where it is on display through May 11. The writer Daniel Halévy, who as a youth often talked with Degas, later noted that it was at the Opéra that Degas hoped to find subjects of composition as valid as Delacroix had found in history. He claimed the ballet for modern art just as Cézanne was claiming the landscape. As he became part of this world of pink and white, so full of tradition, he invented new techniques for drawing and painting it. He haunted the wings and classrooms of the magnificent Palais Garnier, home of the Paris Opéra and its Ballet, where some of the city’s poorest young girls struggled to become the fairies, nymphs and queens of the stage.
“He painted Susanna at the bath me, I paint women at the tub.”Īt the ballet Degas found a world that excited both his taste for classical beauty and his eye for modern realism. “He had the luck, that Rembrandt!” Degas said.
Bathing nudes became a favorite subject, but he once compared his more contemporary studies to those of Rembrandt with mocking wit. But like his contemporaries, Manet, Cézanne and the Impressionists, he lived in an age of photography and electricity, and he turned to aspects of modern life-to slums, brothels and horse races-to apply his draftsmanship. As a student Degas dreamed of drawing like Raphael and Michelangelo, and he later revived the French tradition of pastels that had flourished with the 18th-century master Chardin. “It has never occurred to them that my chief interest in dancers lies in rendering movement and painting pretty clothes.”ĭegas loved to deflate the image people had of him, but his words ring true, expressing his love for the grace of drawing and the charm of color. “People call me the painter of dancing girls,” Degas later told Paris art dealer Ambroise Vollard. the most delightful of pretexts for using pale, soft tints.” Edgar Degas, 39 years old at the time, would paint ballerinas for the rest of his career, and de Goncourt was right about the pretext. “Out of all the subjects in modern life he has chosen washerwomen and ballet dancers. “Yesterday I spent the whole day in the studio of a strange painter called Degas,” Parisian man of letters Edmond de Goncourt wrote in his diary in 1874.
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