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Lot Essay
The world of dance offered Degas seemingly limitless possibilities in the study and rendering of the human body as observed in a singularly perfect mode of expression. Well-practiced in the training and discipline of the ballet arts, lithe and agile women in the flower of youth moved with unsurpassed elegance and refinement, against the background of extravagant and fanciful sets. There was, within this same milieu, the opportunity for Degas to view his favorite subjects in casual, less glamorous moments, when the artist liked to take note of the young women as they were standing about or resting from their work, in situations which he found to be even more fascinating in their visual aspect than the actual performances themselves.
The present pastel drawing Danseuses records a scene of the latter kind, describing a sharply characterized moment in the daily life of a dancer behind the scenes. Degas drew this work during the mid-1890s, while entering the late phase of his career, when he was moving away from evocations of the dance in its formal grandeur and pageantry as public performance, and from there—as it were—into the stage wings, dans les coulisses, looking for novel and inventive ways to present the varied activities in the lives of the dancers as only a knowledgeable insider like himself could reveal. He now focused on the dancers as individuals in groupings of two, three or four figures, viewed close-up in unconventionally cropped formats, depicted in those more familiar and unstudied moments. Scenes such as that represented in the present Danseuses are revealingly informal snapshots of the real daily work at the Opéra; they display a vitality and immediacy that lend these late works their particularly modern sensibility.
"The dancer is only a pretext for drawing," Degas declared to the Irish writer and art critic George Moore (quoted in R. Kendall, Degas: Beyond Impressionism, exh. cat., The Art Institute of Chicago, 1996, p. 134). Degas was not downplaying in this statement the important role of the dancer and dance as his essential inspiration, or the delight that he took in treating this theme, the one for which he was then and is now most famous. He surely intended in these words rather to emphasize his love for drawing, the skill which he prized above all others in the practice of his craft. "The sheer labour of drawing had become a passion and a discipline for him," Paul Valéry observed of Degas during his late years, "the object of a mystique and an ethic all-sufficient in themselves, a supreme preoccupation which abolished all other matters, a source of endless problems in precision which released him from any other form of inquiry" (quoted in Degas, Manet, Morisot, Princeton, 1960, pp. 64 and 82-83).
The present pastel drawing Danseuses records a scene of the latter kind, describing a sharply characterized moment in the daily life of a dancer behind the scenes. Degas drew this work during the mid-1890s, while entering the late phase of his career, when he was moving away from evocations of the dance in its formal grandeur and pageantry as public performance, and from there—as it were—into the stage wings, dans les coulisses, looking for novel and inventive ways to present the varied activities in the lives of the dancers as only a knowledgeable insider like himself could reveal. He now focused on the dancers as individuals in groupings of two, three or four figures, viewed close-up in unconventionally cropped formats, depicted in those more familiar and unstudied moments. Scenes such as that represented in the present Danseuses are revealingly informal snapshots of the real daily work at the Opéra; they display a vitality and immediacy that lend these late works their particularly modern sensibility.
"The dancer is only a pretext for drawing," Degas declared to the Irish writer and art critic George Moore (quoted in R. Kendall, Degas: Beyond Impressionism, exh. cat., The Art Institute of Chicago, 1996, p. 134). Degas was not downplaying in this statement the important role of the dancer and dance as his essential inspiration, or the delight that he took in treating this theme, the one for which he was then and is now most famous. He surely intended in these words rather to emphasize his love for drawing, the skill which he prized above all others in the practice of his craft. "The sheer labour of drawing had become a passion and a discipline for him," Paul Valéry observed of Degas during his late years, "the object of a mystique and an ethic all-sufficient in themselves, a supreme preoccupation which abolished all other matters, a source of endless problems in precision which released him from any other form of inquiry" (quoted in Degas, Manet, Morisot, Princeton, 1960, pp. 64 and 82-83).