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

Obviously, Degas was not the only artist of his generation to be absorbed by such public spectacles as the ballet. He and his forward-looking colleagues, the "New Painters" who came to be known as the Impressionists, regarded whatever entertainments 19th-century Paris had to offer as inexhaustible sources of subjects. As Baudelaire advocated in "The Painter of Modern Life," they took as their points of departure the quotidian events of their own city and their own times, both public and private, indoors and out. For these vanguardists, if something attracted the painter's gaze, it was worthy of being used as the basis of a painting. But even conventional, less progressive painters turned their attention to similar themes, admittedly with very different emphasis and very different results--as some of the comparative ballet images in "Degas and the Dance" confirm.

Even within the context of avantgarde paintings of spectacles and performances, Degas seems set apart, not only because of the sheer number of works with dance themes among his paintings, drawings, pastels and sculptures (a fact already remarked upon in his own day), but also because he seems to have been as interested--or perhaps even more interested--in the hidden, unglamorous side of the dancer's world as he was in the triumphant moment of performance. Some of Degas's images record dancers not when practicing their art but when they are bored or exhausted, caught off-guard stretching tired muscles, flexing sore feet or, as in the pastel Two Dancers (1895-97, National Museum of Fine Arts, Stockholm), adjusting their hair and costumes. Others, like Philadelphia's The Ballet Class, take into account the familiar presence of the dancers' mothers, their teachers and, occasionally, the elegant, affluent men in evening clothes whose seasonal subscriptions to the Opera allowed them to mingle with the dancers in the foyer.

The inclusion of this last group opens up the whole question of the female dancer's place in 19th-century French society, her status as an available woman and the career-enhancement opportunities that the working-class mothers of young girls who were accepted at the Opera's ballet school may or may not have hoped for. The most explicit manifestation of this side of the ballet world of Degas's day was the show's selection of his economical lithographs for his friend Ludovic Halevy's short stories (collected under the title La Famille Cardinal), such as Pauline and Virginie Conversing with Admirers (ca. 1876-80, Fogg Art Museum). These chronicles of two young dancers' journey through the seamy world of backstage negotiations, which first began to appear in 1870 and were published as a single volume in 1883, were considered scandalous at the time for their frank revelations of these tacitly acknowledged liaisons.

Such considerations were underlined by the dominance of female imagery in "Degas and the Dance." The ballet world of 19th-century Paris was, as it is today, a world of youthful, flexible bodies (albeit more robust and less flexible than current taste and technique would find acceptable, as period photos make startlingly plain). Balanchine famously declared that "ballet is a woman," but the aphorism was far truer in Degas's day, when the ballet was an almost exclusively feminine preserve of layered tarlatan skirts, pink satin slippers and ribbons. At the time when the painter seems to have begun attending performances, the tradition of women dancing on pointe was only about two generations old and audiences were still enthralled by this seemingly magical feat. The athleticism and spectacular prowess that modern ballet lovers expect of male dancers were not part of the equation; they were almost entirely relegated to the role of partner, so it's not surprising that virtually all of Degas's images of the ballet, onstage or off, are of women. The most notable exceptions in "Degas and the Dance" are the portraits of the elderly Jules Perrot, one of the few celebrated male dancers of the Romantic ballet period, the partner of such legendary ballerinas as Carlotta Grisi, the first Giselle. Degas drew Perrot, erect and white-haired, a little thick in the middle, grasping a ballet master's stick for beating time, and incorporated the image into several of his acutely observed classroom scenes. But Perrot is an anomaly.