Repetitions: Memory and Making Degas's Ballet Classroom Series

Lauded as the "peintre des danseuses," [1] no other artist has delved into the world of ballet as profoundly as Edgar Degas (1834-1917). For four decades, the ballet fired his creative impulses, inspiring a corpus of nearly 1300 works of art. Be it the characterization of the broad cast of dramatis personae he encountered, the technical aspects of a dance position, or the intricacies of backstage sexual politics, he captured these aspects with the acuity and familiarity of an insider. Organized by the Musée d'Orsay, the Musée de l'Orangerie, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, this exhibition celebrates the 350th anniversary of the Opéra de Paris, which, in addition to being the primary opera company of France, is also the country's primary ballet company. Degas at the Opéra, which opened in Paris last fall, is not the first exhibition to explore the artist's passion for ballet, but it is the most comprehensive, immersive, and lavish one to date, and it adds to his ballet pictures those of opera and music. [2] Spanning ten thematically and chronologically organized rooms, the Musée d'Orsay showcased over two hundred works, including sculptures, fans, architectural dioramas, and other exclusive loans of rarely seen objects from the vaults of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. This panoramic exhibition proposes that many of Degas's most audacious and groundbreaking innovations came in response to the ballet. As established in the introductory text panel and catalogue by Musée d'Orsay curators Leïla Jarbouai, Marine Kisiel, and Henri Loyrette, and the National Gallery of Art's Kimberly A. Jones, the Opéra was a "laboratory," a "veritable catalyst" for Degas's boldest pictorial Chong: Degas à l'Opéra Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 19, no. 2 (Autumn 2020) 134 inventions and technical experimentations across various media. There, he drew from an endless wellspring of subject matter, mixing and matching motifs observed in situ or conceived in the studio. Thus, closely entwined with this analogy of the Opéra as laboratory was the notion of artifice. As the panel introducing the exhibition explained, "Degas rejects painting from nature, and this transmutation takes place in the studio, filtered by memory, and enriched by his imagination. Hence, while his Opéra may well appear real, it is never true to life." Experimentation and synthesis were at the heart of Degas's enterprise-an assertion underscored by the location of the largest gallery, "The Opera, Technical Laboratory," at the very center of the exhibition's floorplan. At the entrance, a large vinyl reproduction of Degas's The Curtain (ca. 1880) greeted visitors (fig. 1). In the image, ominous men in black, wealthy subscribers to the opera with access to its backstage, prowl amidst the painted shrubbery on the scenery flats, preying upon young dancers, hinting at a nefarious undercurrent at the ballet explored later in the exhibition. The first gallery, entitled "Genetics of Movement," opened with a sunny scene of ancient Greece: Young Spartan Girls Challenging Boys also known as Spartan Girls Exercising (ca. 1860-62/1880; fig. 2). Partly based on Plutarch's Life of Lycurgus, this anchor painting provided the entry point that elucidated the link between classical sources and Degas's dance vocabulary. During his three-year Italian sojourn (July 1856-April 1859), Degas immersed himself in the study of Hellenistic sculpture and Old Masters such as Masaccio, Giotto, Mantegna, and Michelangelo. He also dedicated time to life-drawing at the Villa Medici, where Gustave Moreau instilled in him a new appreciation for colorists like Titian, Veronese, and Delacroix. By the end of his trip, he had amassed an impressive portfolio of copies and studies that would serve as visual references for limitless pictorial inventions. The generous selection of Degas's early figure drawings underlined the inherited traditions in his approach to the human body (fig. 3). While these works invoked iconic ancient sculptures such as the Borghese Gladiator, Diana of Galbi, and Hermes Fastening his Sandal, they simultaneously prefigured the staple motifs in his ballet repertoire, such as a ballerina's adjustment of her shoulder strap or a yawn synchronized with an outstretched arm. The integration of Degas's sketches of dancers revealed his use of classical quotations with their quotidian gestures and poses (fig. 4). To quote Jarbouai from her summation of Spartan Girls Exercising: "What we have are recollections of this classic piece of Greek sculpture [the Borghese Gladiator], refracted through the intensely real presence of a live model" (49). The London painting also reflected the artist's respect for the petits rats of the Opéra, who embodied the athleticism, strength, discipline, and rigorous training of their Spartan predecessors. [3] On the opposite wall, the Copy after Mantegna's 'Crucifixion' offered additional insight into the sources for Degas's truncated forms, dynamic figural groupings, and compositional space. As Loyrette aptly notes in the catalogue, the artist's history paintings from the 1860s can be construed as a "dress rehearsal" for his future opera pictures (31).

In this paper Edgar Degas' history paintings are read as the painter's reflection on the irreconcilability of married life and artistic vocation, a major theme of discussion among artists and writers in nineteenth-century France. In The Young Spartans Exercising (1860-62) we see bachelors being banned from participation in the Gymnopaediae. In The Daughter of Jephthah (1859-60), Semiramis Building Babylon (1860-62) and Scene of War in the Middle Ages (1863-65), Degas shows famous unmarried women, femmes fortes who have chosen to pursue spiritual rather than mortal passions, all alter-egos for the artiste célibataire who chooses devotion to art over a family-centred bourgeois life. This article contributes to the view that Degas was neither a misogynist nor a narrow-minded bourgeois. Far from having preconceived patriarchal ideas on marriage and women, Degas choose to remain an artiste célibataire in accordance with the more extreme aspects of the nineteenth-century French cult of the artist as genius. It is the idea of the exceptional status of the artist that Degas elaborates in his history paintings, and that rendered him unmarriageable.

Sculpture Journal, 2009

86 | Sculpture Journal 18.1 [2009] Degas' sculpture betrays a passion for process, structure, material, form, space, suspended movement, privacy and personal voice. Although often studied, the intended function and meaning have hitherto eluded the numerous attempts to classify or contain them. In lieu of a traditional identity as sculpture, these works seem to have been intended to defy precise definition and to enjoy a life beyond that of formal exhibition or public visual consumption. This article sets out to demonstrate that the primary key to understanding Degas' sculpture lies in the reintegration of the works into a larger personal theoretical context, and specifically to demonstrate that there are many parallels between Degas' sculpture and the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé. Consideration of Degas' works in terms of a Mallarméan theory will provide a new foundation upon which to understand Degas' quest for the ephemeral and ineffable, traits which are dominant in his sculpture. This cross-fertilization between the arts of poetry and sculpture provides the requisite clues to decode the language, structure and intended function of Degas' sculpture.

Manet to Picasso: Masterpieces from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2010

Rutgers Art Review, 2014

In scholarship on Edgar Degas (1834-1917), the artist’s two main idols, Ingres and Delacroix, have remained touchstones for discussing Degas’s approach to dessin and couleur. However, in the endless writing about Degas’s appropriations of figures and subjects from other artists, the influence of Ingres and Delacroix as upholders of the French Orientalist tradition has never been taken into account. This paper posits that, in his work of the 1860s, Degas sought to respond to this Orientalist tradition, to reconcile his demonstrated interest in ancient artifacts with his life in modern Paris, and, potentially, to grapple with his perception of himself as an outsider both as an artist and as a Frenchman of mixed heritage. His early combinations of Near Eastern subjects with motifs from the artistic tradition — Semiramis Building Babylon (c. 1861) and Woman with Ibis (1860-62) — manifest this anxiety and fall short of fulfilling his ambitious goals. However, by 1868, when Degas produced the Portrait of Mlle Fiocre in the Ballet “La Source,” his strategic plundering of Salon Orientalism and his desire to depict modern life clashed productively. While the Portrait of Mademoiselle Fiocre has been discussed alternately by scholars as one of his most peculiar portraits and his first attempt at depicting the ballet, I argue that it may be best read as a depiction of the “Orientalism of modern life” — a sophisticated mélange of the traditional harem scene, a contemporary Orientalist spectacle in Paris, and the devastating isolation that, for Degas, accompanied the arrival of modern life.

Of a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in Art History in the Graduate College of

Reading and understanding his poetry as an innovative and exciting medium through which he expressed themes similar to those he explored in his visual art provides the best perspective for our understanding of some aspects of his late works. The question is rather what influence these principles might have exerted over the vocabulary of his plastic arts.My analysis will thus focus on the examination of Degas's sonnets as an integral element of his overall artistic expression, a means to a dynamic end. Close analysis of Degas's themes and use of form and symbolic language reveals not only his awareness of, but also his active dialogue with,Mallarmé's theories of poetic structure, dance, and-as understood in the context of Symbolism-a symbiotic sympathy between the arts.

Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 73/74, 2020

Monographic Exhibitions and the History of Art, Editors: Maia Gahtan and Donatella Pegazzano, 2018

Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, 2018

This article examines how Edgar Degas challenged the compositional and communicative integrity of the artwork by pinning together pieces of paper, pasting them on card, and developing motifs over joins between the segments. Through a close reading of Degas’s late bather pastels, the article locates Degas’s accretive working method within debates about the role of the “fragment” in mid- to late nineteenth-century art critical discourses. It is argued that focusing on Degas’s decision to create works “in pieces” is important for understanding both his place in nineteenth-century art history and the legacy of his oeuvre in European modernism.

Woman's Art Journal, vol. 16, no. 2, 1995

Dealing with Degas is based on papers that were delivered at a symposium organized by the Tate Gallery, Liverpool, in support of its exhibition "Degas: Images of Women" (September 21-December 31, 1989). Comprised of 46 works from British collections, this relatively modest show seems to have been contrived to exploit not only the perennial popularity of the artist and his "images of women" but also their controversial status. It was the latter that attracted the interest of the six British and three American scholars whose comments are recorded here. At the time, only three, Richard Kendall (the organizer of the exhibition and instigator of the symposium), Richard Thomson, and Linda Nochlin had, to varying degrees, a history of publication on Degas, while two others, Anthea Callen and Heather Dawkins, had works in progress. To my knowledge, at least two other Degas scholars (myself and Eunice Lipton) were invited, but abstained. Of the group that participated in the symposium and/or the related book, Kendall, Thomson, and John House were by reputation and by performance here the most conservative, while the remaining six, all women, were generally associated with more revisionist

Valley Humanities Review, 2013

Many scholars have been quick to read Impressionist Edgar Degas' work as either misogynistic or as privileging women with agency. Recently, feminist art history has provoked a rereading of these two main arguments. This essay argues for the importance of a middle ground because Degas' representations of the female form are so varied that it is both difficult and problematic to make conclusions about his perception and subsequent depiction of women.

2020

Anecdotes about ancient artists found in the writings of Pliny and Plutarch have played a central part in the literature of art since the Renaissance. 1 Modern scholarship has devoted great attention to the historiographical importance of these anecdotes and, in various case studies, has analysed the numerous re-readings, transformations and tropes. Little is to be found, however, about arthistoriography's reception of ancient anecdotes on women artists, apart from the many essays on Pliny's account of the daughter of Butades (also known as Dibutades or Dibutadis). 2 This anecdote is perhaps one of the most cited and discussed passages in art history and also one of the most frequently depicted in painting. Found in the Natural History, it accounts for the uncertain origin of painting, invented by the daughter of Butades who traced the shadow of a man on a wall. Even though it consists of only a few lines, it raises issues such as absence and presence, light and shadow, male and female that have been discussed by artists, critics and historians ever since. Not only did it serve as a key argument for the importance of disegno as the father of all arts and for love as the origin of all inventive power, it also ascribed the invention of art to a woman. As Mark Ledbury 1 'From the very origins of art-historical accounts, from the fragmentary (but vastly influential) writings of Pliny on ancient artists about whom we know almost nothing else, through Vasari and all Vasari's imitators, histories of artists are saturated with anecdote.'

accompanying catalogue (Jordan 1985), the first study of Spanish still life in English, incorporated new archival research that challenged previous assumptions of humbleness and asceticism, placing Spanish still life in the context of the period's nascent naturalism and the patronage of educated elites. The catalogue's two influential essays by Jordan (Jordan 1985, cited under Overviews) and Schroth (Schroth 1985, cited under Patronage and Clientele), its detailed introductions to the featured artists, and the extensive and rigorous catalogue entries are still essential for anyone studying Spanish still life. Building upon and expanding the scope of Jordan 1985, Spanish Still Life from Velázquez to Goya (Jordan and Cherry 1995) at the National Gallery in London brought to light new works and renewed attention to issues such as taste and natural history in the excellent introductory essay Jordan and Cherry 1995, cited under Overviews). The catalogue for Flores españolas del siglo de oro (Calvo Serraller 2002) at the Prado Museum is relevant for being the only study focused specifically on flower painting. Although not devoted entirely to still life, two more recent exhibitions are remarkable for placing Spanish still life in broader contexts: El Greco to Velázquez (Schroth and Baer 2008) at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston situates Spanish still life within the reign of Philip III and practices of collecting and display within the aristocratic household, and In the Presence of Things (Carvalho Dias and Cherry 2010) at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon (curated by Peter Cherry) places Spanish still life within the broader European context, where it emerges as a major player. Pérez Sánchez 1983, Jordan 1985, Jordan and Cherry 1995, and Schroth and Baer 2008 also discuss bodegones with figures. Exhibitions on individual artists are discussed under other headings. Calvo Serraller, Francisco. Flores españolas del siglo de oro. Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 2002.