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Lot Essay
The present study is one of a series drawn in the second half of the 1880s in which the Degas depicts the young dancers of the Paris Opera learning their craft. In this drawing the artist shows the arabesque, a particularly graceful pose, but in others he shows the young girls limbering up, stretching and straining as they exercise and try to perfect the elaborate series of movements that comprise classical ballet. This series of drawings is noteworthy for the artist's own critical notation regarding the success of his sketches, and occasionally of the efforts of the dancers themselves, which were to serve as reminders to himself at such time when he might return to the studies for use in a larger composition.
This pastel study reflects the artist's unending and relentless process of exploring the figure in motion. His subjects "are caught in poses which represent one single instant, in an arrested movement which is pregnant with the movement just completed and the one about to follow. To use Baudelaire's words, Degas 'loved the human body as a material harmony, as a beautiful architecture with the addition of movement'" (J. Rewald, Degas's Complete Sculpture: Catalogue Raisonn, San Francisco, 1990, p. 23).
Over time Degas amassed a huge repertory of poses that could be used in his paintings, often combining them to compose an elaborate counterpoint of bodies and limbs that is rooted in real observation, but is also characterized by a sense of expressive artifice that grew progressively freer in his later years. In studies such as the present one Degas took his understanding of the figure to a point where he could comfortably and effectively take dynamic liberties with the body in motion, even as his eyesight began to fail him.
This pastel study reflects the artist's unending and relentless process of exploring the figure in motion. His subjects "are caught in poses which represent one single instant, in an arrested movement which is pregnant with the movement just completed and the one about to follow. To use Baudelaire's words, Degas 'loved the human body as a material harmony, as a beautiful architecture with the addition of movement'" (J. Rewald, Degas's Complete Sculpture: Catalogue Raisonn, San Francisco, 1990, p. 23).
Over time Degas amassed a huge repertory of poses that could be used in his paintings, often combining them to compose an elaborate counterpoint of bodies and limbs that is rooted in real observation, but is also characterized by a sense of expressive artifice that grew progressively freer in his later years. In studies such as the present one Degas took his understanding of the figure to a point where he could comfortably and effectively take dynamic liberties with the body in motion, even as his eyesight began to fail him.