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Degas and the Dance

People call me the painter of dancing girls," Edgar Degas once told Paris art dealer Ambroise Vollard. "it has never occurred to them that my chief interest in dancers lies in rendering movement and painting pretty clothes."

Indeed, Degas became part of the landscape at the Paris Opéra Ballet, sketching girls in tutus as they stretched into pliés, fussed with their costumes, and dashed past him from stage to foyer. A male figure was not so out of place in the recesses of that theater, as wealthy patrons of the ballet, called abonnés, brushed past him in their top hats, becoming part of Degas's portrayals of life behind the curtain.

In ballerinas Degas found a subject that would make him one of the most famous artists of the twentieth century, well-regarded in his own time and even more so after his death, when Impressionism – a label he disliked, but a movement he had an undeniable influence on – became a much-admired and instantly recognizable style of painting.

Degas's depictions of the ballet, both in painting and sculpture, will be part of the free focus exhibition Degas and the Dance, opening October 15 in Canaday Gallery. The show not only celebrates the prolific painter, but the dance itself, with a special display of costumes and memorabilia from the Toledo Ballet. A portion of the exhibition will be a recreation of a rehearsal studio where, like Degas a century before, Museum visitors can watch or sketch dance performances and practice sessions. They can also approach the barre and try a few dance moves themselves.

The local connection celebrates a major milestone for the Toledo Ballet: in 2015, it will celebrate having the oldest continuously running annual presentation of The Nutcracker in the country (75 years and counting).

Born in 1834, Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas (the artist later adjusted his last name) was brought up in a well-to-do Parisian family, the son of a Creole mother from New Orleans and a French banker father. His financial circumstances meant he could devote time to his budding artistic interests and, with the support of his family, he traveled to Italy as a 22-year-old to study the works of masters like Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian. Though his study of the traditional Academic style influenced his early work, by 1865 Degas turned his attention to modern Paris, where he found what would become some of his favorite subjects: horse races, washerwomen, singers, and ballet dancers.

The latter became a primary source of inspiration, and over the course of his lifetime he produced some 1,500 works on the subject. But the athleticism of ballet on the stage – and its easy-to-identify aesthetic pleasures – was not Degas's primary interest. The movement of backstage life and the less obvious beauty of dancers as they crouched on a bench, listened to an instructor, or adjusted the ribbon of a shoe were the scenes that moved him to create a body of work that was popular with collectors.

"The works are visually pleasing but also visually challenging," said Larry Nichols, the Museum's William Hutton senior curator of European and American painting and sculpture before 1900 and curator of Degas and the Dance. "The compositions are complex, as he's putting things in the foreground with strong recesses into space or cropping hands and feet in an unexpected way."

"Degas was enthralled by the ballet," Dr. Nichols said, "and that infatuation pushed him to create. This exhibition and the accompanying catalogue will be a focused, narrow look at some of those creations."

Degas's prodigious body of work includes his challenges to traditional ideas of sculpture (he dabbled in many mediums in his lifetime, including engraving and photography). Degas and the Dance centers on Little Dancer of Fourteen Years, a bronze casting of a figure he originally modeled in was in 1880 and 1881. The 38-inch tall figure, on loan from the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, depicts Marie van Goethem, a student of the Paris Opéra Ballet School. When the original wax debuted in Paris, dresses in a cloth ballet costume, a real braid of hair attached to her head, its realism shocked viewers.

Four additional bronzes of individual dancers in ballet positions from the Clark, as well as TMA's own Study for Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, will also be on view. Rounding out the exhibition will be several paintings of dancers in backstage classrooms, including La Répétition au foyer de la danse (1870 – about 1872) from the Philips Collection in Washington, D.C. and La classe de danse (begun 1873; completed 18750076) from the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, as well as TMA's two pastels, The Rehearsal Room (about 1905) and The Dancers (about 1899). Other lending institutions include the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

"You look at these works and you want to know what's really going on behind all this beauty," said Michael Lang, the Toledo ballet's resident director and choreographer. The Museum's pastel was an inspiration for a performance he is stagining in conjunction with the exhibition. "It's a very competitive world. When I look at Degas, of course the colors and figures always attract me, but then I think: what happened there?

"What was the life in the art, what was frozen in time by Degas?"

Degas and the Dance is sponsored in part by Healthcare REIT, Christie's and Taylor Cadillac.

This article originally appeared in Volume 11, Issue 3 of arTMAtters, the Toledo Museum of Art's member magazine.

Image Credits (from top to bottom)

Edgar Degas (French, 1834–1917), La classe de danse (The Ballet Class). Oil on canvas, 1871–1874. Musée d'Orsay. © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d'Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski.

Edgar Degas (French, 1834–1917), Little Dancer Aged Fourteen. Bronze with gauze tutu and silk ribbon on wooden base,  modeled 1879-81; cast 1919-21. Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 1955.45.

Edgar Degas (French, 1834–1917), The Dancers.  Pastel on paper, ca. 1899.  Purchased with funds from the Libbey Endowment, Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey, 1928.198. The Toledo Museum of Art.

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