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

The same is true of Degas's last dance-related works, his radically simplified late pastels, with their slowly achieved accretions of color or his traced and repeated drawings of dancers and nudes in dance positions. In them, questions of picture-making seem more engaging than the source of the images. Yet the predominance of ballet imagery, both explicit and implicit, throughout Degas's career clearly indicates the importance of the dance to his practice, per haps even to his evolution as an artist.

Though the arrangement in Detroit was not strictly chronological, it was impossible not to be aware of the shift between the near-Classical accuracy of Degas's first paintings of the dance and the near-Expressionist urgency and freedom of the late pastels, with their increasingly rough surfaces, their brilliant and acidic color, their shifting viewpoints and irrational spaces. Whether this change would have happened anyway, over time, in the work of this daring and innovative artist is, of course, impossible to say. But it is tempting to think that Degas's lifelong close observation of dancers--figures made abstract by movement, the repetitive rituals of dance class, the transforming effects of stagecraft or the literal distance imposed by performance--might have suggested startling formal strategies or demanded that he invent unprecedented ways of being faithful to his perceptions. It could also be argued that it was Degas's thirst for challenging visual stimuli, combined with his taste for detachment, that drew him to spectacles like the ballet or the racetrack in the first place. Such questions of cause and effect obviously remain unanswerable. What can be said with assurance is that "Degas and the Dance" not only enlarges our understanding of this elusive master but also makes us consider even his most familiar ballet images in new ways. That's what good exhibitions are supposed to do.

"Degas and the Dance" appeared at the Detroit Institute of Arts [Oct. 20, 2002-Jan. 12, 2003] and is currently on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art [Feb. 12-May 11, 2003]. It is accompanied by a 304-page catalogue that includes essays by the curators.

Karen Wilkin is an independent curator and critic who has often written about Degas. As a student at the School of American Ballet, she appeared for several years in the second act of the New York City Ballet's production of George Balanchine's Nutcracker.