Bodies of knowledge: reacting to an exhibition currently on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the author gives an informed evaluation of Degas's fine eye for the spectacle—and everyday discipline—of professional dance - French painter and sculptor Edgar Degas - Critical Essay

Art in America, March, 2003 by Karen Wilkin

When I was a student at the School of American Ballet, every adult I knew assumed that Degas was my favorite painter. He wasn't, and I was puzzled when they expected me to be enraptured by paintings like the Philadelphia Museum of Art's The Ballet Class (ca. 1878-80). My eye wasn't sophisticated enough for me to understand this complex, difficult and hard-to-classify artist, and, from my dancer's point of view, tutored daily by fierce Russians according to the exacting precepts of George Balanchine, I was dismissive of what I saw as the lax postures, indifferently pointed feet and sloppy line of the rather chubby and (by New York City Ballet and SAB standards) poorly proportioned young women of the Degas dance images. Even their immense tutus and bows seemed incomprehensible; I'd been raised on the City Ballet's barebones "leotard" productions, and we were forbidden to wear anything in class that hid any line of the body. I'm happy to say I've learned a lot since then. Degas has long since joined Balanchine in the highest ranks of my private pantheon of modernist geniuses, although in the interest of full disclosure, I should admit that my feelings about his representations of dancers as dancers have changed very little, no matter how enthusiastic I may be about them as works of art. I've since learned, too, that my parents' friends' instant equation of ballet and Degas was perfectly logical. Even in his lifetime, he was known as "the painter of dancers." If he has remained "the painter of dancers" in the popular consciousness, it is not surprising, since more than half of the output of this prolific painter, sculptor, draftsman, printmaker and occasional photographer has to do with dance themes or the activities of dancers, both onstage and behind the scenes.

Degas's special connection to the ballet is the subject of "Degas and the Dance," a thoughtful, ambitious exhibition organized by Richard Kendall and Jill De Vonyar. The apparently inexhaustible Kendall was also the curator of exhibitions dedicated to Degas's images of women and his landscapes; to his sculpture Little Dancer, Fourteen Years Old; and to his late work. De Vonyar is an art and dance historian with an extensive background in ballet. "Degas and the Dance" focuses not on the stylistic or formal evolution of Degas as maker of ballet images--although, obviously, this forms an important subtext of the exhibition--but instead attempts to chart his relationship to the dance world of 19th-century Paris, through a combination of careful analysis of relevant works of art and exhaustive research, with particular attention paid to the artist's connection to the Opera and the company of ballet dancers attached to that august institution. The lavishly illustrated catalogue that accompanies the show is an invaluable compendium of information about performance practice, stagecraft, the architecture of Paris opera houses, social mores and dance training of the period. Through a careful sifting of documents, photographs, prints and ephemera such as Opera posters and programs, Kendall and De Vonyar track Degas's links to the opera house and its performers. They examine the evidence, both documentary and visual, for his friendships with musicians and dancers or for his access to rehearsals and other backstage activities. They ask how much he really knew about the ballet and the dancers' lives and how he might have learned it. They also ask provocative questions about the changing role of dance motifs and dancers in Degas's art. And they give special emphasis to the artist's connections to the studios behind the scenes, where the inviolable ritual of daily class took place, the world of ballet initiates where both celebrated stars and the young aspirants nicknamed "les petits rats" honed their craft.

As installed at the Detroit Institute of Arts, the show was divided into sections devoted to such categories as portraits of dancers, performance, backstage rituals and the classroom, with excursions into more arcane territory, such as the role of dancers as models in the artist's studio, the nature of classicism and the evolution of dance-derived imagery in Degas's art. The works ranged from relatively straightforward images of performers and students, such as the Philadelphia Museum's The Ballet Class (ca. 1878-1880) that troubled me so much as a teenager, which Kendall and De Vonyar suggest may have been done with a specific audience of male ballet subscribers in mind, to rough-hewn, essentially private drawings and sculptures of nudes in dance positions, such as the vigorous charcoal Nude Dancer (1894, Galerie Beres, Paris).

This intelligent selection of works by Degas, which reveals both his fascination with the ballet world and his inventive exploration of a wide range of mediums, was set in context by the occasional addition of works by other artists of the period and documentary photographs, along with costume designs and stage-decor models, including those for some of the scenes depicted by Degas. The cumulative effect was to suggest that we were following the same path Degas himself took in his transformation from spectator to knowledgeable balletomane, witnessing the development of his growing intimacy with the world of dance. The comparative material confirmed the accuracy of Degas's vision of the Opera ballet, both on- and offstage, at the same time that it unequivocally confirmed his powers of invention and his independence from the esthetic norms of the period, making the formal rigor and absence of sentimentality of his ballet images even more striking. The inclusion of an unworn point shoe, ankle ribbons already sewn in place, once owned by Degas, was strangely moving to me, both because of its provenance and because it was indistinguishable from the modern equivalents that had once been part of my daily experience.