Painting the rhythm of the Paris Opera dancers
Why did Edgar Degas paint ballet dancers?
Degas tried to capture movement in his painting. Throughout his long artistic career he never tired of the ballet dancer as subject and challenge. His backstage access to the dance rehearsal rooms at the Paris Opera gave him the opportunity to closely observe and sketch the stylised poses of the ballerinas as they went through their paces. The opera was an open studio for Degas where he could scrutinise the rhythm of the dancers in motion as often as he liked.
He could not avoid the sordid side of the Paris Opera as wealthy male patrons and donors prowled backstage eying the young dancers. These anonymous top-hatted gents appear in some of Degas’ paintings, loitering behind the sets. They gave money to the place so they felt they could help themselves to whatever was there. The opera benefactors might then consult a parent or guardian to see if they could come to an arrangement to advance the dancer’s career.
Degas recorded one of these meetings but made no judgment, whatever he thought, if he thought about it, he kept for himself. Degas was not known for his empathy. Perhaps he shared the sense of entitlement that many wealthy, middle-class people felt at the time, when important economic disparities and toxic social attitudes encouraged exploitative, dysfunctional relations between bourgeois and working-class to be normalised and to go unchallenged.
No one blew the whistle on the Paris Opera bordello culture in Degas’ time.
Degas, with the exception of his late bathers works where there is an appreciation of female sensuality, does not prioritise judgment and taste in his paintings. What he searched for was a reality—he was a realist—and that reality was sometimes uncomfortable. If he ever had any moral conflict about what he saw or the conversations he overheard at the opera then he buried it because any dilemma would get in the way of what was most important for him—art.
Degas’ enduring relationship with the Paris Opera shows his obsessive side—he returned again and again. Degas loved music and would no doubt have heard the orchestra rehearsing. He was from a rich family himself so the place confirmed his social status.
The sculptural formality of ballet dancing would have appealed to Degas’ classical painting education. The difficult training routines the dancers went through, their search to discipline their bodies to achieve equilibrium, poise and control mirrored his lifelong artistic effort to translate moment and movement into fixed dynamic image.
Degas ballet dancers paintings
Location: 13 Rue Victor Massé, 1859 – 1872/3, point 17
The Dance Foyer at the Opera from 1872, in the Orsay Museum Paris, would have been one of the last paintings executed at point 17.
Walk 2, map of lower Montmartre – Pigalle ; route and points of interest of the Montmartre walking tour Montmartre Artists’ Studios © OpenStreetMap contributors, the Open Database Licence (ODbL).
Location: 77 Rue Blanche, 1872/3 – 1876, point 7
In 1872/3 Degas moved from point 17, in Rue Victor Massé to point 7, 77 Rue Blanche. He was to stay here until 1876.
Degas strikes a pose
It was whilst resident at Point 17, 77 Rue Blanche that Degas and others decided to found the company of artists that organised the 1874 Impressionist Exhibition.
It was also at this address that Edmond de Goncourt the writer, essayist and critic called on Degas in the 1870s. Goncourt was amused to see the normally dour Degas get so carried away by his enthusiasm for the opera dancers that he mimicked a move or two in the middle of his living room.
Degas no doubt had a turn at some of the ballerina’s poses just to see what it felt like to try to hold them. I think he was also playing with de Goncourt and perhaps even angling for some free publicity. The fact that the anecdote has survived shows he was successful.
The Dance Class
The Dance Class from about 1873, in the Orsay Museum Paris, is set in the rehearsal room of the old Paris Opera in Rue Le Peletier which also burnt down in 1873. The famous Paris Opera we see now dates from 1875.
Degas has chosen a diagonal, sweeping frieze-like view. We get a glimpse of the rehearsal room scene as though we have just walked in on an informal visit. There is a lot to take in. We see the dancers gathered around the instructor. He is an elderly gentleman with a large stick. Whilst the baton is nominally to beat out the rhythm of the dance, it is also hefty enough to possess an air of menace.
Some of the ballerinas appear disinterested in the class and have their own agenda: the one closest to us gives a dirty look from behind her fan to someone on the other side of the room. The girl sitting on the table is stretching her neck and scratching her back at the same time. One is adjusting her costume, another her earring. Degas notes the details and the attitudes.
The opera rats
The ballet dancers often came from poor, working- class backgrounds. The bourgeois-dominated opera-going audience, which after the redevelopment of Paris when many poorer people had been evicted from the city, now had little contact with its social inferiors. Middle-class ignorance, fear and distrust of the growing working population automatically meant demonisation.
Girl dancers from humble origins engaged in low-status ballet—ballet dancing in Degas’ day did not enjoy a good reputation—were contemptuously labeled ‘opera rats’ by the critics and clientele who paid money to see them perform. We can get a flavour of the vicious and narrow-minded prejudices of the time by the critical reaction to Degas’ showing of his Little Dancer statue at the sixth Impressionist exhibition in 1881.
What we witness in The Dance Class and other Degas depictions of ballet exercises and rehearsal is a punishing, boring and exhausting regime of relentless work. It almost looks like a bizarre form of punishment that the girls have to endure before they are fit to perform before their social superiors at the opera.
Please see the Bourgeois Men and Working Women page for more on social forces and cultural expectations.
Two Dancers on a Stage
Two Dancers on a Stage from 1874 shows us a couple of working-class dancers. Degas was interested in physiognomy and the fashionable physiognomists of the day attempted to link physical appearance to character.
The girls’ features, from the point of view of the sniffy ideas—or rather the misogynistic prejudices—of the time show us unrefined ‘opera rats’. I think that they both look beautiful and elegant, caught in the spell of performance, but I’m looking from my own time.
We see the dancers from an elevated viewpoint. The figures are painted to the right of the picture surface as though just entering. Perhaps Degas wished to cast the viewer as an opera-goer; we the viewers are in the moment of watching the opera, the picture reflects what we see as we have glanced to the right as their movement catches our attention on stage.
The unusual framing is probably adopted from the Japanese print artists who Degas admired and who typically presented figures off-centre. In the background we see another Japanese technique, cropping, as we glimpse half of a dancer who disappears out of the frame. The painting also features some very loose, smudgy brushwork for the background props which appear to represent foliage or trees. Freeing colour from form was a feature of Degas’ later work as we will see when we look at the nude bather series.
The dancers’ moment of triumph
In spite of the toxic, dysfunctional culture of the Paris Opera and the snobbish prejudices of the times, Degas’ Two Dancers on a Stage are nymphs emerging from the artificial stage-set forest of the Paris Opera, frozen in time for our delight in their moment of triumph. It is Degas and his ballerinas who are remembered because they created a lasting beauty, those who chose to exploit the dancers fall away now and are consumed by their aura.
All photographs © David Macmillan except: (1)
(1) Edgar Degas artist QS:P170,Q46373 Details of artist on Google Art Project, Edgar Degas - The Ballet Class - Google Art Project, marked as public domain, more details on Wikimedia Commons
All photographs © David Macmillan except: (2)
(2) Edgar Germain Hilaire Degas (1834 - 1917) Two Dancers on a Stage 1874 the Courtauld collection. Photo © The Courtauld.