Exhibition Review 'Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement'

The facade of the Royal Academy, 14th September 2011.

         
As a Friend of the Royal Academy (£45 a year gives me and one guest free entry to all RA exhibitions) I was interested to discover that the current  Degas exhibition required all Friends to book in advance due to anticipation of ‘overwhelming interest’.  After jostling with half of London to read some of Van Gogh’s tiny but very interesting letters in ‘The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and His Letters’ (Jan–Apr 2010) I was hopeful that the new ticket system would create a more spacious environment.  Unfortunately ‘Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement’ was still extremely busy, despite (or perhaps because of) it being a Friends Preview day.  There were over 75 Friends eagerly crowding round the artist’s early drawings and paintings in Room 1, and although nowhere near as frustrating as the Van Gogh exhibition, it would have been a far more enjoyable experience had those numbers been halved.  Still, the excitement generated from blockbuster-style exhibitions such as this one (not to mention the National Gallery’s Leonardo exhibition coming up this November) is indicative of the rapidly increasing interest in the arts in the UK and should be welcomed.

Fig.1: Degas, Dancer Posing for a Photograph, 1875,
oil on canvas, Pushkin Museum, Moscow, ©Bridgeman

The Degas exhibition is certainly beautifully presented, with dramatic use of black walls and low Caravaggesque lighting to display the drawings, paintings, photographs and films (a design style which seems to be in vogue at the moment; see the National Gallery’s exhibition ‘Devotion by Design: Italian Altarpieces before 1500’).  Upon entrance to the exhibition a projector screen displays 3 figures of ballet dancers pirouetting in spotlights, creating a sumptuous atmosphere and visually epitomising the exhibition’s title ‘Picturing Movement’.  Indeed, the main focus of this exhibition is Degas’ preoccupation with movement in his study of ballet dancers, looking at how the artist interacted with (and to a certain extent, imitated) developments in photography and early film.  The emphasis on technological developments of photography and film held far greater prominence than I had anticipated, including whole rooms dedicated to key pioneers such as Étienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904) and Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904).  Although Degas’ link with these photographers was possibly overstated (I am evidently not the only one to feel that Degas’ relationship with film and photography was tenuous; see Waldemar Januszczak’s dissatisfied review in the 18.09.11 Sunday Times Culture section) the comparison made for interesting viewing and ensured the exhibition presented a more unique aspect of Degas scholarship.

Fig. 2: Degas, Dancers in Blue, 1890, oil on

canvas, Musee d'Orsay, Paris, ©Bridgeman

Displayed was an impressive quantity of sculptures, drawings, pastels, prints and paintings by the artist, which the Royal Academy borrowed from such varied institutions as the Harvard Art Museum, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow and the Barber Institute of Fine Arts in Birmingham.  Particular highlights for me were Dancer in Front of a Window (fig. 1) and Dancers in Blue (fig. 2), the former, earlier work for its beautiful setting of Paris behind the dancer and the latter work for Degas’ dramatic use of colour.  Three Studies of a Nude Dancer (fig. 3) formed part of a fascinating display that presented all the preparation drawings for Degas’ famous sculpture The Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen (fig. 4) around an image of the bronze, demonstrating how the artist circled his models, drawing them from different angles in order to create the perfect three dimensional ballet dancer.  

Fig. 4: Degas, Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen,
1880-1, cast c. 1922, painted bronze with
muslin and silk, Tate, London, ©Tate2010

Fig. 3: Degas, Three Studies of a Nude Dancer,

c. 1879, charcoal with white chalk on paper, 

Private Collection, ©Bridgeman

Although I would have preferred to learn about why Degas was drawn to depict ballet dancers in such an obsessive fashion (in a more sociological sense rather than the formalistic interest in ‘movement’) and indeed how his representations of the Parisian underbelly of society fitted in with the Baudelairean concept of the flâneur and modernism, ‘Degas and the Ballet’ did present some original and interesting comparisons between the artist and contemporary issues of movement in photography and early films.  Indeed, perhaps the curators of this exhibition felt that Degas has too often been represented as merely a lover of dancers (creating ‘chocolate-box art’ as co-curator Ann Dumas called it) and so instead hoped to present him as a technological genius, considering all different modes of representation in order to brilliantly capture the human form.  In this, they certainly succeeded.

Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement Main Galleries, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 020 7300 8000, http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/ 17 Sep – 11 Dec.