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Lot Essay
Depictions of the ballet preoccupied Degas for the vast majority of his artistic life and the subject matter accounts for by far the most prolific group of works in his oeuvre. For him the dancer represented a perfect model, endlessly repeating the same movements and providing him with seemingly limitless poses through which he could explore the human figure and the torsions created from her movement.
'[In these late] but important pastels of dancers and nudes, he was gradually reducing the emphasis on line in order to seek the pictorial. Resorting to ever more vibrant color effects, he found in his pastels a means to unite line and color. While every pastel stroke became a color accent, its function in the whole was often not different from that of the Impressionist brushstroke. His pastels became multicolored fireworks where all precision of form disappeared in favor of a texture that glittered with hatchings' (J. Rewald, The History of Impressionism, New York, 1973, p. 566).
Pastel was very much a favoured means of expression for Degas by this time and it was in this medium that he performed some of his boldest technical and artistic experiments. In its simultaneity as a drawing and a painting tool, Degas found that its rich, chalky surface was ideal for rendering both the smooth flesh of his models and the variety of surfaces and fabrics of their clothing. It is in the pictures of dancers, the 'priestesses of grace' as Degas called them, that he fully explores the medium's luminosity and versatility, achieving in the present work a lavish exploration of colour and texture, as well as a grace of movement that so captured collectors' imaginations in the 1890s. As Degas himself claimed, 'They call me the dancers' painter. They do not understand that the dancer has been no more for me than an excuse to paint pretty materials and convey movements' (cited in G. Adriani, Degas, Pastels, Oil Sketches, Drawings, London, 1985, p. 82).
'The dancer could be seen as an incarnation of drawing. Line was the governing element of her achievement, the right and the wrong of what she was doing. Line was given by her limbs, her arms and legs, the centering of her body, her à plomb. To draw a dancer's body was to re-enact through her limbs the terms of figure drawing itself, both as description and as expression. How often in his drawings of dancers the line of an arm or a leg will soar out from the body, cutting out a shape that has no meaning that can be translated but presents itself simply as a measured claim upon space?' (R. Gordon & A. Forge, Degas, New York, 1988, p. 176).
'[In these late] but important pastels of dancers and nudes, he was gradually reducing the emphasis on line in order to seek the pictorial. Resorting to ever more vibrant color effects, he found in his pastels a means to unite line and color. While every pastel stroke became a color accent, its function in the whole was often not different from that of the Impressionist brushstroke. His pastels became multicolored fireworks where all precision of form disappeared in favor of a texture that glittered with hatchings' (J. Rewald, The History of Impressionism, New York, 1973, p. 566).
Pastel was very much a favoured means of expression for Degas by this time and it was in this medium that he performed some of his boldest technical and artistic experiments. In its simultaneity as a drawing and a painting tool, Degas found that its rich, chalky surface was ideal for rendering both the smooth flesh of his models and the variety of surfaces and fabrics of their clothing. It is in the pictures of dancers, the 'priestesses of grace' as Degas called them, that he fully explores the medium's luminosity and versatility, achieving in the present work a lavish exploration of colour and texture, as well as a grace of movement that so captured collectors' imaginations in the 1890s. As Degas himself claimed, 'They call me the dancers' painter. They do not understand that the dancer has been no more for me than an excuse to paint pretty materials and convey movements' (cited in G. Adriani, Degas, Pastels, Oil Sketches, Drawings, London, 1985, p. 82).
'The dancer could be seen as an incarnation of drawing. Line was the governing element of her achievement, the right and the wrong of what she was doing. Line was given by her limbs, her arms and legs, the centering of her body, her à plomb. To draw a dancer's body was to re-enact through her limbs the terms of figure drawing itself, both as description and as expression. How often in his drawings of dancers the line of an arm or a leg will soar out from the body, cutting out a shape that has no meaning that can be translated but presents itself simply as a measured claim upon space?' (R. Gordon & A. Forge, Degas, New York, 1988, p. 176).