Edgar Degas Appreciated

IN 1903, when ballet had been a prolific subject of Edgar Degas for over 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.

The Dance Class” (around 1873) — part of “Degas's Dancers at the Barre: Point and Counterpoint,” a show coming to the Phillips Collection in Washington — operates on several levels.

This already said much: in ballet he had found a modern source of classicism. Yet Degas’s 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’s late paintings may well point the way to Matisse’s bold Modernist masterpiece “La Danse” — 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.

This fall brings the opportunity to home in on his ballet work with two different exhibitions. At the Phillips Collection in Washington “Degas’s 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 Barre” (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).

To read more:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/arts/dance/degass-ballet-at-the-phillips-collection-and-royal-academy.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=Edgar%20Degas&st=cse