Degas and the art of the dance.

• Author: Keyes, Norman
• Position: Museums Today - French Impressionist Edgar Degas - Museum of Art exhibit - Cover Story

IN AND AROUND the bars below Montmartre in Paris, where the sometimes melancholy artist could be seen hanging out with his Impressionist contemporaries, Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas (1834-1917) was known as "the painter of dancers." In literal terms, of course, this was only partly accurate. The French artist's greatness also resonated in many works devoted to horse racing, women washing and drying themselves, brothel scenes, and Parisian cabarets and cafes. He was an astonishing draftsman, equally fine in pencil and the pastel that he ultimately preferred, and his wax sculptures caused contemporary critics to marvel, even though only one, depicting 14-year-old dancer Marie Goethem, was displayed in his lifetime. Nevertheless, it was the subject of the ballet that most obsessed the artist. He sometimes attended the same opera or ballet more than 30 times. In all media, he time and again captured the motion of the young girls--graceful ones and awkward ones alike--as they strained themselves to exhaustion. The theme occupied Degas until the last decade of his life, when encroaching blindness curtailed his production.

Unlike Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and his fellow Impressionists, whose canvases frequently exalted in the brilliant sunlight of country vistas, Degas became increasingly fascinated by the interior worlds he would find in Paris by the early 1870s, including its opera halls and theaters. He limned or brushed night scenes punctuated by lights and relished unlikely perspectives that seem to viewers infinitely more revealing at times than spectacles observed from a coveted box seat. Degas presented dancers as hardworking women who struggled to develop their skills, sometimes became dispirited, and only occasionally achieved stardom. He probably identified with their discipline and dedication, and their art provided a niche for his own developing artistic identity.

Degas scrupulously eliminated architectural ornamentation from his pictures, whether he was depicting scenes from the old Opera on the rue le Peletier that he had loved or the later Opera, the Second Empire Palais Garnier, whose elaborate style he disliked. The only public space at the Pads Opera that Degas depicted was the stage. The center of attention for spectators, it offered the artist a chance to represent a fascinating intersection of reality and illusion. In "Orchestra Musicians," for instance, the artist's radical vantage point puts viewers squarely in...