“The ‘explosion’ of sensuous and tactile qualities in Degas’s late pastels conveys a physicality that transcends the depiction of the female body in two dimensions.”
Articulated with the lyrical expression of form and vibrant palette that exemplify the artist’s mature work, Trois danseuses reflects one of Edgar Degas’s most iconic and enduring motifs: that of the ballet dancer (figs. 1-2). At the turn of the century, the dancer remained thematically prevalent within the artist’s work, having first appeared in the late 1860s and shortly after become a regular subject in the artist’s repertoire, initially appearing in oil paintings portraying the performer on stage, before moving to more experimental pastel depictions of dancers caught away from the prying eyes of the audience. In Trois danseuses, Degas develops this theme further through a bold chromatic configuration. Colour is paramount and whilst the artist continues to render certain elements in exquisite detail, others, including the surrounding stage scenery, reflect an abstraction of form that prefigures artistic developments to come.
“The ballet dancers deserve a painter dedicated to them, in love with the gauze of their petticoats, the silk of their tights, the pink of their satin ballerinas, the soles powdered with resin. He is an artist of extraordinary talent whose confident eye can capture on canvas, in his pastels and watercolors - and even, on certain occasions, in his sculpted work - the very seductive oddities of such a world. It is Mr. Degas who treats the subject excellently, knowing precisely how a ribbon is tied around the skirt of the dancer, the tights’ waist adjust to her arch, the silk is tightened on her ankle.”
By the mid-nineteenth century, when Degas came of age, opera and ballet counted among the most popular forms of entertainment among the upper echelons of Parisian society. Degas attended performances at the rue Le Peletier Opéra from a young age, but it was the lavish new opera building, the Palais Garnier (fig. 3) that would become the main source of inspiration for the artist, affording ample opportunities for him to observe and draw the human form in motion, as well as capture the fanciful cost.mes s and sets that decorated the stage. By the mid-1880s, Degas had become such a regular fixture of the venue that he remarked to the new director: "You have done me so many favours, that I feel myself a little tied to your fortune and that I am about to become, as they say, one of your employees" (the artist quoted in Jill DeVonyar and Richard Kendall, Degas and the Dance, New York, 2002, p. 14). Through his close observation of dancers at the Palais Garnier Degas was able to broaden his understanding of colour and form in order to achieve one of his key pictorial objectives, effectively capturing the body in motion.
Degas had long been fascinated by the body in motion and his painterly concern was mirrored in the photographic studies undertaken by Eadweard J. Muybridge (see fig. 4). Degas, like Muybridge, sought to capture the body in various stages of movement and the range of movements enacted by dancers both on and off the stage provided the artist with the perfect subject. Repetition was integral to Degas’s artistic practice. In a manner reminiscent of Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro’s series work, Degas returned obsessively to the Palais Garnier to study the dancers and recreate the scenes in his studio. As curator Martin Scwander observed: “The extensive groups of works produced in this way embodied a new notion of “serial” processes in art that anticipated later developments” (Martin Schwander in Exh. Cat., Basel, Fondation Beyeler, Edgar Degas, The Late Work, 2012-13, p. 18).
According to Lemoisne, Degas created five variations of this precise subject matter. Each of these works dates from circa 1904-06 and is executed in pastel. Pastel, as opposed to oil, offered Degas a greater artistic freedom, enabling the artist to render his ballerinas in pure strokes of vivid colour as evident in the present work. The malleable nature of pastel allowed Degas to further manipulate colour and form through a careful smudging of the medium, haloing the figures to create the impression of movement. "Further features of Degas’s late work include discontinuous spaces, asymMetricas l compositions (becoming increasingly diffuse as they expand outward from the center), unusual viewpoints, and unconventional poses with the figures always in the area nearest to the viewer” (ibid., p. 17). The present work, and the series to which it belongs, exemplifies this aspect of his later practice and of these five works, Trois danseuses boasts a particularly experimental palette and application of line. Both in the choice of medium and its handling, Trois danseuses is indicative of Degas’s adept draftsmanship and painterly prowess: “With pastel he could draw like a painter and paint like a draftsman” (ibid., p. 18).
Marking a definitive shift away from the show of on-stage performances, Trois danseuses presents the viewer with an intimate scene of quiet expectation, before the dancers take to the spotlight. Degas places the viewer in the role of voyeur and we witness small human acts free from the mask of performance. Here, the three dancers shift restlessly in the stage wings, adjusting their cost.mes s in anticipation. The crop of the composition, combined with the informal presentation of the subjects reflects recent developments in photography and heightens the voyeuristic atmosphere of the scene (fig. 5). Caught unaware in a moment of respite, Degas’s ballerinas reflect the psychological and physical toll of the performance: “These captivatingly beautiful, melancholy, almost dreamlike images evoke the effort and sacrifices that the dancers have made in their striving for artistic perfection. At the same t.mes , they can be read as visual metaphors of Degas’s approach to art, the striving for the ‘perfect image’ based on constant variation and repetition of a limited repertory of forms” (ibid., p. 19). In both its handling and its subject matter, Trois danseuses is a remarkably modern and deeply avant-garde depiction of la vie Parisienne that would have a profound impact on modern and contemporary artists alike.
