Capturing Motion: Edgar Degas and His Dancers

Born in 1834 into a wealthy Parisian banking family, Edgar Degas is usually classed among the Impressionists, and although he mastered their favored technique and adopted their subject matter — scenes of contemporary life, the theater, Parisian cafés and their patrons — the painter disliked the Impressionist label and preferred to call himself an "independent." His traditional academic training steered Degas toward realism and taught him to prize the human form, but in his search for new ways to depict it, and in his desire to capture motion, he began painting ballerinas, who became his ideal models. Below we take a closer look at specific works that made the greatest contribution to art history.

Edgar Degas, self-portrait (photo: Wikipedia)

"The Star (Dancer on Stage)"

Edgar Degas, "The Star (Dancer on Stage)" (photo: Wikimedia Commons)

In ballet Degas found nourishment both for his academic sense of classical beauty and his hunger for modern realism. Seeking naturalness and intimacy, he often depicted dancers in motion, during dance lessons or getting ready backstage.

By the mid-1880s the artist's principal medium had become pastel, with which he tried things never before attempted — bold outlines, dry hatching, blended strokes and even fingerprints — until he finally mastered the technique. Pastels allowed Degas to render figures absorbed in dance to perfection; crossing strokes underscored the tension and complexity of their movements. Degas once told the Parisian art dealer Ambroise Vollard: "People call me the painter of dancers... they never think that what interests me most is movement and beautiful clothing."

"Dancer with Wings"

Edgar Degas, "Dancer with Wings" (photo: Wikimedia Commons)

The artist practically lived at the Palais Garnier, home to the Paris Opéra and its ballet, where the poorest girls hoped to become the heroines of traditional productions. Using modern compositions, unexpected vantage points and stark, artificial light, Degas showed ballet stripped of illusion and glamour — his works reveal determination, hard work and the strength of young ballerinas.

The compositions of Degas's paintings resemble photographs (it is no accident that he later became a photographer) — they seem cropped, like a frame cut from a larger image. Asymmetry and an unexpected vantage point mattered greatly to the artist.

Over the course of his career he created some 1,500 works depicting dancers, of which about half are sculptures. Most of the wax sculptures were made after 1880, when the painter's eyesight began to fail and he decided to keep studying the figures of ballerinas and bathing women through sculpture instead.

"Little Dancer"

Edgar Degas, "Little Dancer" (photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

The collection of ballet-inspired sculptures Degas left behind consists mostly of wax pieces that were studies of the human body, but the one work later cast in bronze — "Little Dancer" — became one of his most famous creations. Degas made the wax figurine in 1880 and exhibited it at the Impressionist exhibition the following year. Let us examine it more closely. Degas turned the figure of Marie van Goethem into a wax statue one-third life size. She stands with one leg extended forward, in the fourth ballet position, feet turned outward, hands clasped behind her back and chin raised. The artist dressed the sculpture in a bodice, pleated gauze skirt and satin ribbon sewn by a doll-maker, and topped it with real hair. He then coated the whole in hot wax, which fixed everything in place while still preserving its texture. The public was baffled, yet captivated — they had never seen anything like it. To them the "sculpture" evoked ancient customs, bronze and marble, total refinement — not this strange combination of materials and an unformed young girl. Some critics declared the girl "vicious" and condemned Degas for depicting ugliness; others said it was "the only truly modern... version of sculpture."

After the artist's death in 1917, 28 bronze sculptures were cast from the wax model. Today they are displayed in the world's most renowned museums, where they continue to demonstrate the timeless beauty of Degas's dancers and their importance to modern art.

Degas and Photography

Edgar Degas, "Henri Lerolle with His Daughters" (photo: Musée d'Orsay)

As already mentioned, photography, a fairly new invention at the time, was an important hobby of the painter's. One amusing story has survived to this day about how Degas, having talked his friends into posing, ruined an entire evening. According to one of his friends: "He ran back and forth in front of his models; dashed from one end of the drawing room to the other with the happiest expression on his face; rearranged the lamps, changed the reflectors, tried to light our feet by setting a lamp on the floor." Degas's victims had to sit motionless in the same pose for two minutes at a time, so that by the end of the evening everyone but the artist felt sick from the camera. "At half past eleven everyone dispersed, and Degas walked off with his camera, as proud as a boy with a rifle."