ARTS JANN PARRY PORTRAITS OF GRACE


Edgar Degas was fascinated by ballet and the female form; his images of dancers are inscribed on popular imagination. An exhibition at the Royal Academy in London explores his work


W


hy was Degas so obsessive about depicting female ballet dancers? The curators of the Royal Academy exhibition (until 11 December),


Richard Kendall and Jill DeVonyar, propose one answer in the show’s subtitle: Picturing Movement. Their emphasis is on Degas’ attempts to capture bodies in action, antici- pating the technology of motion pictures. Degas was certainly interested in photog-


raphy, still in its infancy (dancers had to hold still for so long that they needed wires to hold their limbs in position). He bought a camera of his own in his sixties and the exhibition displays modern prints of his only three sur- viving photos of dancers, in poses that reappear in his pastels. He knew of experi- ments in stop-action photography by Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey, whose multiple images are animated on screens in a central gallery. But the thesis that Degas was a nineteenth-


century Leonardo da Vinci, fascinated by technological advances, doesn’t account for his love of ballet and the female form. As the selection of his works in the exhibition reveals, most of the figures aren’t actually dancing: they’re waiting, resting, adjusting their hair, clothes and shoes, stretching their limbs in readiness for action. Ballet is an art form that requires immense preparation: years of train- ing, daily classes, endless rehearsals, long periods of hanging about before the brief excitement of a performance. Degas was adept at capturing the slumped exhaustion of a bored ballerina, legs splayed, feet turned out. Quite rarely does he paint her on pointe, poised in an arabesque. Sketches and figurines found in his studio


after his death show that he observed his dancer subjects as intimately as he did his laundresses, milliners and naked bathers. He obviously loved the ungainly grace of women going about their everyday tasks, whether brushing their hair, ironing linen or propping an outstretched leg on the barre. He captured these unguarded moments in sketches he later worked up into compositions that appear as spontaneous as a snapshot. “I assure you no art was ever less spontaneous than mine,” he asserted – and drawings in the exhibition


reveal how carefully he studied the Parisian dancers, noting the technical names of their steps and poses. There’s no evidence that he lusted after the


ballet girls. They were available as models because their rehearsal studios in two suc- cessive opera houses were near his ateliers. He gained access to the backstage foyer de la danse, though he was not typical of the top- hatted abonnés who lingered there expectantly. (Surprisingly, there are none of his many paintings of dark-clad men waiting in the wings in this exhibition: just one of male heads in the stalls half-watching a ballet of phantom nuns.) He knew how badly paid the dancers were in the fin-de-siècle period he was painting them: “In reality most of them are poor girls doing a very demanding job and who find it very difficult to make ends meet. I’ve got to know these ballet pupils since they have been coming to pose for me.” One of them was Marie van Goethem, the daughter of a Belgian tailor and a laundress. She is the “Little Dancer of Fourteen Years”, in a bronze cast of the original painted wax statuette that appalled spectators in 1881. He knows her inside out, having drawn her count- less times: no wonder her eyes are half-closed with the tedium of posing for hours on end. He circumnavigated her as she stood still, feet turned out, hands clasped behind her, childish chest and stomach protruding: he drew her from every angle, clothed and unclothed, in a remarkable series of 26 sketches displayed near the sculpture. Unlike most of the dancers in his paintings and pastels, she’s a recognisable individual. Her history is on record, up to the point when she was dismissed at 17 from the corps de ballet for being late or absent too often, and she probably came to a bad end. (A more suc- cessful sister made it as a soloist in the Paris Opera Ballet.)


One of the reasons Degas didn’t depict male dancers, with a sole exception in this exhibi- tion, is that they scarcely featured in decadent French ballet. The influential members of the Jockey Club de Paris so preferred watching women that the role of the hero, Franz, in the 1870 ballet Coppélia, was danced by Eugénie Fiocre en travestie, revealing her shapely form.


Edgar Degas’ La Danse Grecque, 1885-90. Pastel on joined paper laid down on board


Male dancers made their careers in St Petersburg or Copenhagen, leaving Paris to the girls. All the same, when Degas was entranced by a visiting Ukrainian folk dance troupe in 1899, his vivid pastels feature women only. Film of such troupes of the period, screened alongside his pictures, show plenty of men in action. Degas, whose sight was fail- ing by then, was either blind to male dancers or could more clearly see the women’s flaring skirts. The penultimate gallery with his late pastels is ablaze with light and saturated colour, a relief after a sequence of low-lit rooms to protect the fragile sketches. Towards the end of his working life (he died


in 1917), Degas suffered from photophobia and wore darkened spectacles. He compen- sated by colouring his fantasy ballet girls’ fanned-out tutus in impossibly gaudy hues. Here there are no details of shoe ribbons or facial features: these are evocations of dancers he could only remember. But his earlier descriptive paintings of back- stage rehearsal rooms and onstage performances are so imprinted on the popular imagination that they are still how ballet dancers are seen. Modern photographers try to capture similar images of dancers preparing their entries from the wings, fixing a shoe or a shoulder strap. Though today’s students and professionals have more


athletic


physiques, they adopt the same positions at rest. Degas remains the best depicter of dancers – a reproof to the legions of bad balletomane artists who have tried to emulate him ever since.


■Jann Parry is former dance critic of The Observer and author of Different Drummer, the award-winning biography of the choreographer Kenneth MacMillan.


1 October 2011 | THE TABLET | 27


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