THE ART OF DANCE
A pioneer of Realist Impressionism, artist Edgar Degas broke ground with his depictions of the working lives of Parisian dancers. Here, stars of the Australian Ballet stage a fitting tribute to la Belle Époque’s “ballet painter”.
Stars of the Australian Ballet stage a fitting tribute to Edgar Degas, la Belle Époque’s “ballet painter”.
Winged urchin, dancing on the greensward floor, one scrawny arm, upraised to hold the pose, brings balance to your body and your flight. I wish you fame: I know what fame bestows.”
– Edgar Degas
In Salle 31 at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, surrounded by Cézannes, Monets and Manets, a tiny dancer stands in situ, posing in ballet’s fourth position with one leg twisted in front of the other, her tutu hanging limp mid-thigh, a ribbon tied around the back of her hair, and her slightly pinched face with its sweet snub nose pointing upwards as if in defiance of an instruction from a tutor. On a recent visit I was admiring the bronze sculpture La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans ( The Little Dancer Aged 14, 1881), one of Edgar Degas’s most iconic artworks, when dozens of schoolchildren suddenly burst into the salon and made a beeline for her. I stood and watched as they mimicked her pose, took selfies with her, and left fingerprints all over the glass cabinet as they got up close in admiration.
The same artistic fascination is occurring in Melbourne right now, where another of Degas’s tiny dancer sculptures (one of scores of bronze surmoulages made from the original waxwork, which now lives in Washington D.C’s National Gallery of Art) stands in the midst of the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), a centrepiece of the winter masterpiece exhibition Degas: A New Vision. At the exhibition’s opening night in June, a young girl in a pink tutu, not unlike the figure in a Degas painting hanging on the wall next to her, breezed past and looked up at the 19thcentury ballerina. For a brief moment it appeared as if they were twins, life imitating art, separated in reality by glass, but in history by decades in time.
They are magical, Degas’s dancers. They appear in several forms – delicate pastel drawings, exquisite paintings and the moulded bronze sculptures – and form a legacy borne out of an Impressionist history that belies a dark truth. Degas called his dancers gamin ailé – winged urchins, creatures who came from the streets of Paris – and his depictions of them have brought balletic beauty and admiration to lovers of art and dance alike. Degas created art from his unique observations of 19th-century Parisian society at large: family, workmen, horse racing, boudoirs. But unlike other artists of his era, his works lifted the veil on what was on show, providing a painterly equivalent of modern-day photojournalism. Despite being one of the most celebrated of the French Impressionists, Degas hated the term, preferring instead to be known as a Realist.
He painted family portraits with obvious spousal tensions, workmen taking a break, and naked women brushing their hair and drying themselves after a bath. It was this raw, observational eye that brought a new insight into the world of ballet, and his depictions of dancers backstage, in rehearsal, waiting in the wings and behind the red curtain, have captured the imagination of a new generation of art aficionados and re-entered the modern Zeitgeist through retrospectives (most recently another blockbuster at New York’s MoMA, Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty, which wrapped in July), in theatres, and even in cinemas.
It was a chance encounter with a bassoon player in the famous bohemian haunt of Café Guerbois in the 1870s (also frequented by a who’s who of the French arts: Manet, Monet, Zola, Pissarro, Sisley and Renoir, among others) that introduced the young, gregarious Degas into beautiful world of the Paris Opéra Ballet. At the time he harboured a burning desire to break away from the conservative salon system of the grand narrative or historical paintings, and his introduction to the back-of-house and rehearsal spaces provided the perfect setting for documenting the social statement he wanted to make.
Degas’s works were groundbreaking in their day, explains Ted Gott, senior curator of international art at the NGV, because they revealed an unexpected viewpoint, that of the working ballet corps – rehearsing in class, adjusting their slippers, stretching at the barre, practising en pointe, finishing the arabesque – rather than ballerinas in full flight on stage (although he painted some of that in his later years). It was what Degas left out of the picture that remains enticing.
“He doesn’t actually show us the action, he loves the moment before,” Gott explains. “I liken it to a coiled spring. You look at a coiled spring and the next thing it’s going to do is burst out. It’s quite clever, really, it has more impact sometimes than showing the ballerina on stage, because [you feel] the tension before she goes on stage. I think he’s playing with us in a very clever way, he’s allowing us as viewers to participate in the narrative … because he knows our imagination will finish the story because we know she’s just about to go on stage and our brain does the link.”
Degas wanted to make a social statement about the poor conditions and low pay of the working ballerina, who at the time were paid less than half the salary of a shop assistant.
“I think he likes to show us back-of-house to remind his audiences of the incredible hard work that’s put into these performances,” Gott adds. “And therefore they [ballerinas] aligned with the laundresses, with the women working in milliners’ shops, he’s interested in showing Parisian society: the nuts and bolts of how things actually work behind the scenes. You wouldn’t think a laundress ironing is a glamorous subject for an artist.”
The Little Dancer was a case in point. The real-life model, Marie Van Goethem, who also appeared in several paintings, was just 12 when Degas began sculpting her in 1878 (she got paid between five and six francs per sitting). She was, in fact, one of those urchins, known as “opera rats”, who joined the Paris Opéra Ballet to escape a life of poverty – her mother was a laundress and her sister was a prostitute. While another of her sisters went on to become a prima ballerina, according to Gott, little Marie “dropped out of dance class and disappeared at age 16 into the streets of Paris and was never heard of again”.
While The Little Dancer today is exhibited in rooms full of extraordinary masterpieces in museums around the world, Degas exhibited the original sculpture in 1881 among a series of portraits of murderers who had just been guillotined.
“There are layers behind it that, at the time, would have been read by the audience that we’ve lost that sort of context today,” Gott says. “He called those drawings Criminal Physiognomy. And people knew these murderers because it was a famous trial that had galvanised everyone, and you put the 14-year-old dancer against that and he was sort of saying to society: ‘Your lack of support for this type of dancer is what is leading to criminal actions, what are you going to do about the situation?’”
Society took offence, and as a result The Little Dancer was attacked and Degas never exhibited another sculpture again while he was alive. Despite this, he made hundreds more sculptures, many of which he destroyed and remade on a daily basis, melting them down and remaking them in the morning. Upon his death, 150 sculptures were found in his studio, many broken into pieces, but which have since been rebuilt and are on display in galleries and museums around the world.
A self-confessed bricoleur (one who tinkers), Degas loved to redo his works and never considered them finished. Gott recalls a famous story about Degas who, after niggling at a collector over many dinner parties, was finally allowed to borrow back one of his pastel dancer works to “touch it up a little”, only to later admit to destroying it in a failed bid to improve it. “This sort of word got around and then other collectors began to hide their works when Degas came over for dinner,” Gott says, laughing. “We’ll probably never know how many works of art Degas did.”
What we do know is the hundreds of works that do exist showcase an extraordinary artistic repertoire that propelled Degas to become one of the greats, one who continues to inspire modern artists a century after his death. Degas was an artist who never rested, always moving relentlessly ahead and coming up with new ways to create art. He took up photography in his 50s and even created his own materials for painting and sculpture.
“It was not the case for Renoir, for example. Renoir was a wonderful artist and a wonderful painter but sometimes, you know, he was resting without renewing himself, doing always the
same things,” says renowned Degas scholar Henri Loyrette, the former director of the Louvre and Musée d’Orsay, who curated Degas: A New Vision. “With Degas he was always looking at something new and something different, tracking new media, for example, inventing some of them. This is the impression we wanted to create in this exhibition, of something that is always moving on and with this quest for art and tracking it not only in the different scenes but the different techniques.”
Degas once said: “A drawing is not the form, it’s a way of seeing the form.” His fascination with movement – shown with his racehorses, factory workers, milliners – cemented his curiosity for dancers. More than half his works are of dancers, and he spent many hours in studios watching ballet classes and rehearsals, earning the moniker “the ballet painter”.
“Dance was interesting for him because he was always [describing] the movement and not only the natural movement, but people working, people at work,” says Loyrette. “He always said, for example, dance interests me because it is a way to see the form and to look at the movement carefully.”
Photographer Justin Ridler, who used Degas paintings as the inspiration for this shoot with members of the Australian Ballet, says the artworks remain relevant despite “being so linked to our collective iconographic definition of nostalgia and a sort of lamentation for the Belle Époque”. “I think the images he created are so captivating because they speak to the part of us that understands the fleeting ephemerality of beauty,” says Ridler, a former dancer who regularly photographs the ballet. “There’s a strong sense of memento mori in his work; often he paints an aged violinist playing to young ballerinas. I love this subject particularly, Degas is telling us: ‘Look how fleeting it all is!’”
Ridler adds that Degas’s paintings help give him a different perspective to the dancers he sees through his camera lens. “I’m often moving quite quickly with the dancers I photograph, in many ways the camera and the dancer and I are engaged in a kind of choreographic moment,” he says. “Degas would have been limited from a temporal point of view by his canvas, his work is observational, voyeuristic and meticulous, which I highly admire. He creates beautifully considered compositions.”
Towards the end of the Degas exhibition at the NGV, there is an entire room dedicated to Degas’s dancers, where captivating paintings in blues and reds and oranges line the walls, dancers in the nude and dancers at play. It is a beautiful, final plié of an exhibition showcasing more than 200 works from the extraordinary artist, who left a grand legacy for the lover of an exquisite artform.
For the dancer, Degas helped change the public’s perception of the ballet. “Before there were cameras, mobile phones and behind-the-scenes video, there was little way of knowing what it was like behind the scenes of a theatre towards the end of the 19th century,” says the Australian Ballet’s artistic director David McAllister. “These landmark works of Degas give us an insight into the backstage world of the Paris Opéra at that time and over many years have inspired the imaginations of ballet lovers and aspiring dancers to follow in those elegant ladies’ footsteps to enter the magical world of ballet.”
Meanwhile for Degas, the ballet was simply another form of expression. The artist, who died aged 83 in 1917, once said: “The dancer is nothing but a pretext for drawing.” Degas: A New Vision runs until September 18 at the National Gallery of Victoria. For details go to www.ngv.vic.gov.au.