Description

Done on several pieces of tracing paper attached to board, this pastel by French artist Edgar Degas depicts two young female dancers. At left, one dancer adjusts the strap of her dress, her face in profile. Behind her stands a second dancer with her back to the viewer, raising her arms and touching one ear. The pastel is applied very loosely, and the figures are depicted close to the picture plane in three-quarter-length poses. Thick, brown outlines define the forms, while blue and yellow tones can be seen on the dancers’ costumes and in the background. White highlights—which today appear brighter than they would have originally, as the paper has darkened over time—punctuate the composition.

Context and Analysis

Degas depicted dancers repeatedly over the course of his career. He exhibited with the Impressionists, a progressive group of artists working in France in the 1800s who sought to break with contemporary artistic conventions in technique, subject matter, and professional hierarchies. Many of them sought to portray everyday life in a new and disarming way. For Degas, that meant presenting women at work, such as laundresses, milliners, and performers. Viewers in the 1800s found his subjects novel; they were also struck by the manner in which he presented them. In this pastel, for example, Degas did not depict the dancers in the graceful positions of a ballet performance, but rather caught them in private moments that would have occurred during practice or backstage during performances.

In exploring such subjects, Degas produced a vast number of works on paper. This pastel was created around 1890, toward the end of his career, when he often drew inspiration from his own art. Apparently compelled to explore and perfect the formal qualities of certain compositions, Degas repeated the same pose time and again. The girl adjusting her strap, for instance, can be seen in the lower left corner of a painting by the artist now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington (National Gallery of Art, 1963.10.122). Related charcoal drawings also exist, and Degas may have traced one of them to create the present work. The multiple additions to the page suggest that he was determined to show the poses in their entirety, unhampered by the original size of the paper. Degas favored pastel as a medium, since it allowed him to produce defined lines, seen here in the contours of the figures, as well as areas of delicate shading, visible in the bent left arm of the central figure. His skillful combination of these two levels of finish gives the figures weight and substance, and evokes another of his artistic pursuits, sculpture.

Connections

Compare this work to Lotte Jacobi’s Portrait of Hanja Holm with Dance Group from 1938 (Currier, 1986.11.2.2). Jacobi, who was named honorary curator of photography at the Currier in 1971, used black-and-white photography to capture dancers’ raised arms and obscured faces. In doing so, she produced sculptural forms reminiscent of Degas. Jacobi’s play with shadow and overlapping figures allowed her to use the human body as a vehicle to explore line and shape, much like Degas’ drawings of dancers, for which early photography served as inspiration.

Written by Elizabeth A. Nogrady

Bibliography

Boggs, Jean Sutherland, and Anne Maheux. Degas Pastels. New York: Braziller, 1992.

De Vonyar, Jill, and Richard Kendall. Degas and the Dance. New York: Abrams, 2002.

Shackelford, George T. M. Degas, the Dancers. Exh. cat. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1984.