"Little Dancer, Aged
Fourteen," 1878-81. Bronze and fabric, Philadelphia Museum of
Art (Philadelphia exhibition).
By A.L. Dunnington
PHILADELPHIA, PENN., and NEW HAVEN, CONN. -- Edgar Degas is well
known and well loved for his delicate drawings, luminous
paintings and incisive observations of modern Nineteenth Century
Parisian life. But beyond the masterly draftsmanship, the use of
shimmering, ethereal and sometimes shocking colors, the visceral
literalness of his sculptures, Degas was a revolutionary artist
who became a pioneering leader among the radical Impressionists
roiling the art world with their iconoclastic works.
While Degas began his art education with traditional studies of
the great masters, he achieved fame and critical success by
vaulting beyond the academic, and experimenting with every aspect
of this craft, from technique and perspective to subject matter
and movement. He became not only an innovator in his own time,
but a precursor to the modernists, laying groundwork for the
likes of Picasso and Matisse.
Degas lovers can enjoy a double treat over the course of the next
couple of months with two separate shows exploring his work and
times: "Degas and the Dance," a major 135-plus work exhibit at
the Philadelphia Museum of Art that runs through May 11; and
"Edgar Degas: Defining the Modernist Edge," at Yale University
Art Gallery that closes May 18. Both shows, although different in
scope and intent, present stunning works accompanied by
provocative scholarship.
A Brief History of Degas, the Artist and the Man
The first of five children, Edgar Degas was born in Paris on July
19, 1834, to cultured, upper bourgeois parents. Degas's love of
arts and music was fostered at home, and continued over a
lifetime. He became a devotee of the Paris Opera and ballet,
sometimes attending the same performance repeatedly, developing
deep familiarity with what would become his signature subject
matter.
"Horse with Jockey; Horse Galloping, Turning the Head to the
Right, the Feet not Touching the Ground," cast after 1920 from
a wax sculpture probably modeled in the mid-1870s. Bronze (Yale
exhibition).
But before establishing himself as a "painter of dancers," Degas
took an academic approach to his art education. After receiving
his baccalaureate at Lycee Louis-le-Grand in Paris, he studied
some of the great masterpieces as a copyist, receiving permission
to copy works in the Drawings Collection at the Louvre, and the
Print Collection at the Bibliotheque Nationale. In 1855, he was
accepted at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts; from 1856 to 1859, he lived
and traveled in Italy, where his art studies included particular
attention to engraving, and the work of Rembrandt -- both of
which influences are apparent in his early "Self Portrait," 1857,
etching and drypoint.
Degas returned to France when he was in his mid-20s, and began
his professional career, setting up a studio in Paris. He toiled
in relative obscurity until, at age 30, his "Scene of War in the
Middle Ages," circa 1863-65, was accepted at the Salon of 1865,
marking his first inclusion in the prestigious art show.
In July 1870, France declared war on Prussia. Degas, who had just
turned 36, joined the National Guard. It was in the military that
he learned his eyesight was failing, a slow progression toward
blindness that would haunt him for the rest of his life.
More hardship followed: Degas's father, who had supported his
son's career as an artist, died in 1874, leaving the family
bankrupt. It was now imperative that Degas earn income by selling
his works, and he did so through Paris dealers. When the first
exhibition of Impressionist art opened in Paris that April, Degas
submitted ten works, and received favorable mention for his scene
at the race track, "The False Start," circa 1869-72.
By 1877, Degas was producing monotypes and prints, and 23 of his
paintings and pastels, along with three groups of his monotypes,
were featured at the third Impressionist exhibition. At the fifth
Impressionist exhibition, in 1881, Degas introduced "Little
Dancer Aged Fourteen," 1879-81, his first sculpture, in a
collection that also included drawings, pastels, paintings and
prints. Five years later, Paris dealer Paul Durand-Ruel organized
an Impressionist exhibition in New York, the first in the United
States. Twenty-three of Degas's works, including "Jockeys," circa
1882, were included. When Degas exhibited a set of ten
large-scale nudes at the eighth Impressionist exhibition in Paris
the following month, however, many were deemed "ugly" by critics.
Degas's first solo show was held in 1892, when he was 58,
showcasing landscape monotypes. Over the next several years, as
his eyesight continued to deteriorate, Degas experimented with
photography and sculpture. His second solo show was held at the
Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, in 1911; the following year,
art collector Mrs. H.O. Havemeyer acquired "Dancers at the
Barre," 1876-77, for 478,000 francs, marking the highest amount
ever paid at auction for a living artist. When Degas died in
1917, at age 83, his career had spanned more than five decades,
and left a lasting influence on the history and evolution of
western art.
Degas and the Dance
"Degas and the Dance" is the first major exhibit to explore
Degas's intense fascination with the ballet, and the activities
surrounding his beloved Paris Opera.
"It's extraordinary to think of an artist as well-known as Degas,
and realize that there was an aspect of his work not yet
explored," said Julia Brown, director, American Federation of
Arts (AFA), who organized the exhibition. "People are familiar
with his dance images but no exhibit had focused solely on that
and explored it."
The result, "Degas and the Dance," was five years in the making,
opening at the Detroit Institute of Arts in October 2002, before
traveling to its only other venue, the Philadelphia Museum of
Art. Created in 1909, AFA initiates and organizes traveling art
exhibitions with the mission of making great works available to a
wide public, and creating opportunities for new scholarship.
In the case of "Degas and the Dance," Brown said, the AFA brought
in Degas expert Richard Kendall, who collaborated on the catalog
with Jill DeVonyar, an independent art historian and curator.
Kendall and DeVonyar are currently in Paris, working on a film
about the dance images of Degas and the world of Nineteenth
Century ballet in Paris.
"Their work on exploring this aspect of Degas and the dance is
new ground; they went straight to the source material," Brown
said, adding that the result is an invaluable look at an artist
through the prism of one subject area: "You learn more not only
about the works themselves, but about the artist as an
individual, his involvement with the dance world and the opera,
and the cultural life of Paris at that time."
In the course of their research, Kendall and DeVonyar determined
that Degas often depicted specific performances at the Paris
opera, but was extremely selective in terms of what he chose to
include. "He wasn't just painting what was there," said Kate Haw,
AFA's curator of exhibitions. "His intricate weaving of
imagination and reality was more complicated than anyone
thought."
As Kendall and DeVonyar write in the catalog:
"However knowledgeable about the ballet or the Paris Opera
[Degas] was, his pictorial engagement was neither passive nor
merely documentary, just as his other preoccupations of the day
-- with the cabarets, cafes, laundries, hat shops, and brothels
of the city -- were marked by a radical reinvention of current
visual modes. The more we learn about Degas's familiarity with
the Opera and its dancers, the more ruthlessly selective his
vision appears to be."
The exhibit includes period photos of dancers Degas knew; stage
designs; works by other artists who influenced him -- all
presenting a broad context for understanding Degas's life, times
and work. "Degas and the Dance" also conveys the extent to which
Nineteenth Century Parisians loved the ballet. Classic operas
were often interrupted by divertissements, ballets that
were simply inserted into a performance to please theatergoers,
some of whom attended solely for the ballet segments.
The ballet and its dancers, in some respects, became to Paris
audiences what movies and film stars are to audiences today: They
had the aura of celebrity; they created a stir. The Paris Opera
became a place to see and be seen, a place of both business and
social currency, particularly for the abonnes -- annual
subscribers who represented the city's elite, and were wealthy
enough to secure seats or boxes, which were often passed on
through families for decades. These subscriptions brought with
them particular privileges, including backstage access, portrayed
in Degas's renderings of male figures in top hats and tails,
lurking in the wings or darkened corridors. The opera events both
enveloped and transcended the ballet dancers themselves -- an
experience Degas captured in his work partly through the use of
unusual angles and cropping techniques.
"Their legs savagely cut by the edge of the stage, their coral
and silver dresses suppressed by shadow or ablaze with light, the
background figures in 'Orchestra Musicians' (circa 1870-71, oil
on canvas), were among the very first dancers to be painted by
Edgar Degas," write Kendall and DeVonyar in the catalog. "It was
a startling debut for an obscure thirty-five-year-old, one of a
cluster of ballet scenes he began around 1870 that were soon to
launch his career as 'the painter of dancers.'"
The dancers often had male suitors who served as patrons. Stage
mothers anxiously urged daughters into the ballet, sometimes in
hopes they would catch the fancy of an abonne and land a good
catch. But the work of the dancer was arduous and demanding, and
Degas drew and painted his female dancers over and over, until he
was intimately familiar with every move and gesture.
Despite what some critics have theorized, his was not a mere
voyeuristic pursuit, Haw said: Degas sought to create a realistic
picture of what life was like for the dancers. He captured the
boredom, the competition, the pain -- the unlovely daily grind of
grit and discipline and endless repetition that led to the
luminous loveliness on stage.
Of his obsessive attention to the detail of the real, Kendall and
DeVonyar write:
"Degas's critics frequently remarked on the ungainliness of the
models in his ballet pictures, describing them as 'bizarre and
ugly rather than graceful,' or as 'skinny girls with uncertain
shapes and repulsive features, whose movements lack harmony.'
Much of this resentment can be traced to the disparity between
public image and private reality, between the dancers who Degas
most often represented -- those engaged in 'bizarre and ugly'
classroom activities -- and idealized notions of the 'graceful'
ballerina. As in his other studies of the working women of Paris,
from laundresses to prostitutes, Degas was evidently committed to
making art for his fellow citizens out of the raw material that
nourished their luxury and pleasure. At the Opera, this
necessarily involved what Eunice Lipton has called the
'demystification of the dance,' a matter-of-fact engagement with
long hours in class and rehearsal rooms, where youthful physiques
were tuned for their fleeting roles in the footlights."
What "Degas and the Dance" reveals, along with the beauty and
delicacy and revolutionary nature of Degas's work, is how his art
developed, and how determined he was to capturing the essence of
a moment, the truth behind appearances.
The show is organized thematically, around such subjects as dance
practice; the rehearsal room; backstage life; scenes alluding to
the performances themselves; and the separate dynamic taking
place in the wings. Related materials are included in each
section, so visitors can examine how Degas drew on both reality
and his own imagination to develop his innovative vision.
Because Degas's interest in ballet spanned a lifetime, the
exhibit also follows the evolution of the artist's style and
range. In Degas's later years, for instance, as his eyesight
diminished, his works became more abstract, focusing more on the
relationship between colors than on clarity of form.
"Degas and the Dance" also provides an opportunity to see works
that are rarely shown together. This includes a large number of
pastels, which, because of their fragility, are rarely released
on loan. To see 15 or 20 pastels by Degas in one exhibit is
unusual, Haw said, as is the sheer number of works by Degas
gathered together on this one subject.
In the end, what Haw hopes visitors take away from "Degas and the
Dance" is not only the insights gained by viewing the artist's
lifelong exploration of a single subject, but the plain and
simple joy of experiencing the beauty of his work.
Defining the Modernist Edge
While the "Degas and the Dance" exhibition at PMA closely
examines one subject pursued over a lifetime, "Degas: Defining
the Modernist Edge" at Yale University Art Gallery represents the
range of subjects, modes and materials Degas explored, said
Jennifer Gross, the Seymour H. Knox Jr. curator of modern and
contemporary art.
"We were looking to do a more intimate show, so that when you
stand in the room, the circumference of Degas's oeuvre and
practice is at your fingertips," she said of the 20-piece
exhibit.
"Our varied Degas collection, the core of which is featured in
this thought-provoking exhibition, reiterates and expands upon
what continually intrigues viewers about Degas: that he was an
unrelenting artist, working in oil, pastel, charcoal, sculpture
and printmaking, who critically visited and revisited problems of
form and process throughout his long career," writes Jock
Reynolds, Henry J. Heinz II Director, Yale University Art
Gallery.
Comparing "The False Start," circa 1869-72, oil on panel, with
"Jockeys," circa 1882, oil on artist's board, painted a decade
later, is a case in point. "Jockeys," said Gross, uses unusual
cropping techniques influenced by Degas's interest in photography
and the widespread use of binoculars at the races, which
magnified and isolated particular scenes.
"The palette is very acidic and startling compared to earlier
works," said Gross, who organized the exhibition and edited the
accompanying catalog. "The arresting colors complement the press
of energy between the jockeys and the animals, while the sea foam
green and pink sky increase that sense of compressed energy
accentuating this fragment in time."
By comparison, "The False Start," painted a decade earlier,
offers a more traditional perspective. Horse racing, imported
from England, had become an upper class activity among Parisians
of the mid-Nineteenth Century.
"An awareness of his English artistic predecessors...is apparent
in several of these compositions, from the placing of the
spectators' stands to detailed incidents among horses and rides,"
writes Yale assistant curator Susan D. Greenberg.
Similarly, in his paintings of ballet dancers, Gross said, "Often
Degas is nestled down among the dancers. Rather than a literal
representation of his subject, Degas offers a view of the world
where this energy exists. By inviting us in, he makes us acutely
aware of a world transformed, of the conflation of private and
public life, where class boundaries are being questioned, and
gender roles are broken down."
"The Dance Class," 1874. Oil on canvas from the collection of
the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Philadelphia exhibition).
In "Conversation," circa 1884-95, oil on canvas, for instance, a
woman is draped over an office desk. "She consumes most of the
composition but we don't know her relationship to the man at the
desk," Gross said. "Rather than a portrait, we experience her as
an ambiguous representation of women in a public setting."
Degas was interested in this new class culture and the breakdown
of traditional boundaries in society and in art, often exploring
both themes through his paintings of women going about their
daily activities, be it ballerinas at practice or laundresses
bathing.
Paris had attracted a whole new working class, and thousands of
rural young people came to the city to seek their fortune, Gross
said. Theirs was often a rough and tumble life, and Degas sought
to capture the essence of it.
"Degas was different from most Impressionists -- he was more
experimental with the medium, questioning the artifice of art,"
Gross said. In so doing, he pushed the boundaries of his art,
taking the viewer to the right of center stage, for instance,
showing dancers obscured by orchestra players.
Degas was not interested in abstraction per se, Gross said, but
his subjects became vehicles for artistic exploration because he
knew them so well. His experimentation contributed to a shift in
"art making," she said, which ultimately led to the modernism of
Matisse and Picasso, where the immediacy of the creative process
becomes part of the subject.
"Our hope is that by having brought together incredible works by
Degas, there is something here everyone can connect with. Whether
it is seeing his dancers as people -- tired, bored, hardworking,
dealing with the daily wear and tear of life -- or nudes that
represent the true, not idealized, female form, in all his works,
we see Degas's beautiful abilities as an artist."
"Degas and the Dance" runs through May 11 at the Philadelphia
Museum of Art, Benjamin Franklin Parkway and 26th Street, For
information, including schedule of special events, call
215-763-8100 or visit www.philamuseum.org. Ticket prices are $20
for adults, $17 for seniors, students and youths 13-18; $10 for
children aged 5-12; and free for children age 4 and younger.
"Degas and the Dance," a fully illustrated catalog published by
the American Federation of the Arts and Harry N. Abrams, Inc (304
pages, 190 color plates, 125 black and white) is available
through the PMA's museum store for $49.95, hardcover; $35,
paperback. "Edgar Degas: Defining the Modernist Edge," runs
through May 18, at the Yale University Art Gallery, 1111 Chapel
Street (at York Street), New Haven. Admission is free. For
information, 203-432-0600 or www.yale.edu/artgallery. A fully
illustrated catalog published by Yale University Press is
available in the museum store for $16.95.
