EDGAR DEGAS

(1834-1917)

Danseuse

Footnotes

We are grateful to Professor Theodore Reff for his assistance in cataloguing this work.

Provenance
Anon. sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 22 March 1920, lot 10.
Anon. sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 3 June 1927, lot 15.
The Hon. H. Marks Collection, London.
Thence by descent to the present owner.

'The sheer labour of drawing had become a passion and a discipline to [Degas], the object of a mystique... a supreme preoccupation which abolished all other matters, a source of endless problems in precision which released him from any other form of inquiry. He was and wishes to be a specialist, of a kind that can rise to a sort of universality.'
- Paul Valéry

As Edgar Degas' life drew to its close, his drawing practice reached its ascendency. Increasingly reclusive, suffering the decline of his vision due to a progressive retinal disease, he toiled in his four-floor studio at rue Victor Massé, thick with clouds of pastel dust and stacks of unfinished sketches. There he drew with monkish devotion, altering, colouring and reworking his compositions, tracing them on top of one another, transferring the loose media of their ever-changing forms from sheet to sheet. Pastel and charcoal at this time truly liberated Degas' approaches to colour, light and form, leading him to create his most poignant and truthful works, of which Danseuse is a quintessential example.

In a fleeting glimpse, a ballerina adjusts her shoe between performances. Although she is not dancing, her entire presence is animated with motion, as her bold, vigorously applied contours are accented with the lively, flurried strokes of her arms, legs and tutu. At the same time, the delicate pattern of her spine traversing upward into her carefree coiffure evokes a certain intimacy. Heavy zigzags of charcoal at the base of the scene – some of which have been smudged into shadows – evoke the dark recesses of the backstage, access to which was a sought-after privilege for the cultural elite. The solid pink colour field of the door – its foundations rendered sensitively with Degas' trademark pastel wash – seems to underscore the ballerina's femininity, as its heavy vertical lines of charcoal generate a visual caesura. The light streaming in from the stage beyond, conjured up by the blank space of the sheet, gently hints at a narrative – one that Degas hides just out of reach, preferring the viewer to instead meditate upon this simple, personal and poignant vignette.

Degas presents to the viewer a series of visual paradoxes: boldness and fragility, balance and spontaneity, intimacy and detachment. The resulting sense of transience, the stoking of the imagination, the leaving of questions unanswered are all central to Degas' dogma. At this time, he was drawing more from memory than from observation, making the splendour and mastery of his late technique all the more extraordinary. His compositions became simpler and bolder, depicting single figures or small groups within ever more abstract interiors. Anatomical accuracy gave way to the poetic, as Degas fused his imagination with the real world, creating a pictorial mythos that rests upon subjectivity rather than objectivity.

In carrying out these aims, pastel was Degas' ambrosia. In its opacity, it allowed him to layer colours and fully rework compositions, working rapidly from sketch to sketch. At the same time, its powdery constitution allowed him to mix it with water and solvents to create pastes and washes. Degas' mastery of this versatile medium thereby engendered expressive compositions that possess a kind of magical, shimmering iridescence. While pastel allowed him to draw with colour, charcoal's friability enabled diverse delineations of form and space, granting his compositions a sculptural force. The harmony of these media led drawing to rival oil painting in Degas' late work, evidenced by the striking stylistic affinities between his artworks of these types. Indeed, as the ballerina of the present work makes a cameo in the circa 1889 painting Danseuses au foyer (Foundation E.G. Bührle, Zurich), she retains her startling vitality, as Degas renders her in oil with the rapid manner of a pastellist.

This stylistic evolution within Degas' drawings coincided with a transformation in his methods of production, beginning at the close of the nineteenth century. His process began with a charcoal sketch on thin tracing paper, comprising bold, bassline contours followed by short staccato strokes. Then, he would apply a vaporous fixative by boiling it and directing the steam toward different aspects of that composition. Once the medium was secured, the mounters of his studio would apply the sheet to a lightweight piece of card, granting the artwork the required opacity and solidity for the ensuing stages. Next, Degas would apply coloured pastel, sometimes separating those tonal layers between further layers of fixative, preventing their pigments from intermixing. This sustained the chromatic intensities of the different colour fields, flattening their textures and allowing Degas to revisit his sketches across months and even years. Degas' mounting and fixing method therefore held key importance in his creative process, being reserved for charcoal drawings that he wished to develop further – and for which he often had a buyer in mind. This complexity of material and method has led Christopher Lloyd to liken Degas' studio to 'Prospero's cell – or, less poetically, the laboratory of a forensic scientist' (C. Lloyd, Edgar Degas, Drawings and Pastels, London, 2014, p. 273).

The highly physical nature of Degas' late practice imbues his drawings with a kinetic force – one that resounds in the physical statures and poses of his subjects. Indeed, Degas held a lifelong fascination with ballerinas. Embodying his passion for music, they also provided a vehicle by which Degas could explore the human form and the poetic qualities of Modern Parisian urban life. As such, Degas followed Charles Baudelaire's edict to extract the beauty from the everyday, and depict the fragmented, Modern existence - in other words, to be both a man of the world and a man of the crowd. In his late oeuvre, Degas' dancers inhabit moments of rest and repose between performances, yawning, stretching and tending to their shoes. This banal shade of beauty brings with it a tinge of irony, as the viewer's experience is far from that of the Parisian theatregoers', who would instead observe the dancers' refined talents, alluring costumes and flawless physiques. Access to the backstage – a privilege that Degas keenly persuaded the ballet companies for – thus opened a vibrant world from which he could evoke fleeting glimpses of reality that were transformed by his own imagination.

Paul Valéry described Degas' overall goal as trying 'to combine the snapshot with the endless labour of the studio, enshrining his impression of it in prolonged study – the instantaneous given enduring quality by the patience of intense meditation' (Valéry quoted in C. Lloyd, Edgar Degas, Drawings and Pastels, London, 2014, p. 285). Degas assumed this goal from his superiors, Gustave Courbet and Honoré Daumier, as well as his contemporaries, Édouard Manet and James Abbott McNeill Whistler. At the same time, Degas fiercely defended his individualism as an artist, taking cues from the many turning points of nineteenth and twentieth century art, yet refusing to subscribe to a movement. Unlike his avant-garde peers, he extracted the pursuit of ideal beauty from French academic and Romantic painters, employing the expressiveness of Jean-Auguste-Dominique-Ingres' arabesque lines and the emotional intensity of Eugène Delacroix's colour. Conversely, however, he rejected their rigid formulae and traditional methods of draughtsmanship. These contradictions culminated in Degas' belief that in order to safeguard one's chosen artistic values, one must continue to subvert and transform them.

Critics therefore acknowledge Degas as standing at the very precipice of Modern art, serving as a vital link between the Romanticism of Ingres and Delacroix on one hand and the unfettered experimentation of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse on the other. In addition, the total liberation of his drawing practice inspired ensuing artistic generations, such as the Abstract Expressionists - Elaine de Kooning's assertive, flurried brushstrokes, for example, speak clearly to Degas' late work. Degas' pastel compositions are widely considered to be his most desirable works, with his late output truly encapsulating his mastery as a draughtsman. While his contemporaries and predecessors utilised charcoal and pastel for limited uses, Degas saw their multitudinous potentials, continuing to draw ever more radically and impulsively. Danseuse remains a striking and rare example of this most fruitful period, encapsulating the very phenomena that have cemented Degas' position in the pantheon of Modern art.