Paintings Drawings Sculptures 2016 - Jean Luc Baroni

the inner world of mind and spirit as well as the
outer world of physical substance and sensation. A
shrewd chronicler of the brothels, slums, and cafés
of contemporary Paris, it was the theatre ballets and
bohemian cabarets, an integral part of voguish Parisian
culture, that gave Degas unequalled opportunities for
the exercise of his brilliant skill as a draughtsman, for
the exploration of artificial light and for creating often
essentially abstract compositions from the costumes
and motions of the dancers.
Far from being an arcane pursuit enjoyed by a privileged
few, ballet had by the nineteenth century become a
popularized art form. Ballerinas were increasingly
publically revered and relentlessly scrutinized as
embodiments of erotic desire. Photographs of dancers
were widely distributed, stage performances were
regularly critically reviewed, and tales of salacious
backstage antics fuelled the voracious public
predilection for rags to riches stories and scandalous
gossip. In reality, the life of a dancer was one of
ceaseless hard work and infinite dedication. The École
de Danse, the legendary Paris Opéra dance school,
was one of the most demanding ballet academies;
young girls joined at the tender age of six and eight,
often to help support their families, working six day
weeks whilst existing in the poorest and most squalid
areas of the city. Most of these ‘petits rats’ endured
many years of intensive training for very little benefit,
victimized not only by poverty but also by the sexual
exploitation suffered by them at the hands of the
abonnés, the capricious desires of whom could singlehandedly
determine a young dancers’ fate.
From the early 1870’s onwards, Degas frequently
adopted ballet themes as a primary vector for his art.
He produced a prodigious number of sketches devoted
to the subject of dancers, in a variety of media, often
working from live models in his Montmartre studio,
exploring the human form in meticulous detail, both
clothed and nude, between rest and movement, from
every angle, oblique and distorted, and always at
close hand. Encouraged by his close friend the author
and playwright Ludovic Halévy, a rather melancholic
chap referred to by his friends as ‘la pluie qui marche’,
Degas was also a regular visitor to the Opéra, where
he recorded countless images of the backstage hiatus
and fatigue of the rehearsal rooms - young dancers
exhausted with limbs aching, every sinew strained,
fixing their hair, adjusting their tutus, waiting for
instruction from the Maître de Ballet or simply gazing
catatonically into space in interminable boredom.
With a gimlet eye, Degas developed a huge repertoire
of poses that he then recycled, repeated and reversed
in his paintings to create choreographic patterns of his
own invention.
Dated to around 1873, this superb drawing depicts
two young dancers from the Opéra’s corps de ballet
engaging in their daily routines, one performing a
battement or developé à la seconde, and the other
with her back turned from the viewer, adjusting her
corset, at rest and seemingly unaware of her audience.
The stance of the figure performing the battement
establishes a powerful axis through the composition;
the tension in the pose of her lithe body with arms
taut and legs flexed creates an elegant fluid classical
line displaying the influence of the draughtsmanship
of Ingres. With short, robust, parallel strokes of pastel,
Degas skilfully defines forms. Limbs are drawn at first
tentatively with transitory, ephemeral lines and then
articulated more decisively with a stronger charcoal
contour. Rather than eliminate his first impressions,
the artist leaves them untouched thus imbuing the
sheet with the animation and vitality of the human
figure in motion. With optical veracity Degas here
deploys pastel strokes in a way that is as much
autonomous as descriptive. The virtuoso dashes of
white chalk, like strings of glimmering pearls against
the vibrant green coloured paper, serve to animate
the rumpled surface of the dancers’ dresses and the
shimmering satin ribbons of their pointe shoes adding
an almost lyrical atmospheric sensibility to the entire
composition.
The present sheet is a preparatory study for the
figures of two of the dancers in the painting, ‘The
Rehearsal’, c. 1873-1878, now in the Fogg Art
Museum, Massachusetts (fig.1). A further comparable
drawing of circa 1874 can be found at the Norton
Simon Art Foundation, California. As with the present
sheet, the Norton sketch is drawn in white pastel and
charcoal, the dancer is in battement pose, and the
figure is similarly encased within a linear framework.
As Richard Kendall and Jill DeVonyar have stated,
Degas used the same technique for both drawings –
that of transferring the images of the dancers to the
canvas of the painting by way of a superimposed
grid: ‘Almost every dancer in The Rehearsal was first
studied by Degas in one or more drawings that he
then carefully transferred to his canvas. This process
often involved superimposing a grid of lines on the
drawn sheet that was subsequently repeated on the
picture surface […]. Another sheet of this kind is Two
Studies of Dancers [the present work], for which
Degas has chosen a rich green paper in order to
explore the light and shadow on his young model.
[…] Almost reverting to his earlier classical manner,
in his drawing Degas specified the outlines of her
body and tutu – again containing them within a grid
for ease of transfer to canvas – and added delicate
highlights in white chalk’. 1
142