.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
拍品專文
Throughout his career, the Impressionist artist Edgar Degas was preoccupied with one medium and one subject above all others: pastel drawings of ballerinas. Quatre danseuses, depicting four tutu-clad women in the wings of the Paris Opéra, is an exquisite example belonging to a series executed between 1890 and 1910. This fully-worked pastel epitomizes the artist's brilliant color choices and bold compositional strategies, as well as his experimental approach in applying pastel to paper.
People call me the painter of dancing girls. It has never occurred to them that my chief interest in dancers lies in rendering movement. Edgar Degas
In Quatre danseuses, dancers watch and wait for their turn to perform—or, perhaps, rest immediately after coming off stage. The quartet, wearing clementine-colored bodices with cobalt-blue tutus, is informally arranged in a diagonal line from the upper left corner to the lower right. While Degas’s composition may depict multiple ballerinas in a single moment, some art historians have argued that the subject is fact a single dancer adopting different poses over time, and that the artist conflated these sequential poses onto the space of the page. This interpretation is supported by the fact that the dancers wear identical costumes, have the same rich, chestnut-brown hair, and their facial and anatomical features are indistinguishable from one another.
Degas likely drew inspiration from the early experiments in chronophotography, which features multiple, consecutive snapshots of a figure moving through space on a single sheet in order to create the illusion of animation. Consider, for example, a plate titled Women from the British photographer Eadweard Muybridge's Animal Locomotion of 1887—which, like the present work, depicts a woman wielding a fan.
Degas also repurposed his own independent studies of ballerinas in order to create multi-figured compositions. The standing figure holding a fan at the center of Quatre danseuses, for example, can be traced to a pastel and charcoal sketch of a dancer in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. This dancer’s pose recurs in different media across the artist’s oeuvre, including the present work; here, she appears in combination with three other figures drawn from other individual studies. Though the composite group in Quatre danseuses is a fiction of the artist’s imagination, the figures nonetheless produce the effect of raw, organic spontaneity, due to their seemingly random, unselfconscious gestures.
Closely related pastels include examples in the Saint Louis Art Museum and Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford. These chromatic variations upon the same theme demonstrate the artist’s seemingly endless pursuit of perfection. The Saint Louis Art Museum’s Danseuses à l’éventail, for example, features the same arrangement as in Quatre danseuses. However, in the Saint Louis sheet, the composition is cropped along the right edge, so that the face of the dancer in the lower right corner is no longer visible; she also grips her calf, rather than her ankle ribbon. Additionally, the costumes differ in color from the present work: the dancers’ tutus are cerulean and lime, instead of orange and blue. In another related pastel at the Wadsworth Atheneum, the tutus are rendered in shades of lavender and marigold.
In this series, Degas used the triangular bulk of the ballerinas’ tutus and the wedge-shaped fans as vehicles for color; pastel clearly satisfied the artist’s voracious appetite for saturated hues. According to Julie Manet, the daughter of Berthe Morisot, Degas once described his work in this medium as “veritable orgies of color” (Growing Up with the Impressionists: The Diary of Julie Manet, New York, 1987, p. 177). At the third Impressionist exhibition in 1877, critics noted that Degas had largely abandoned oil painting on canvas in favor of this medium, which continued to dominate his artistic production for the next several decades. The instantaneity and flexibility of pastel suited Degas’s mercurial temperament, as well as his dynamic subject matter.
Even this heart of mine has something artificial. The dancers have sewn it into a bag of pink satin… slightly faded like their dancing shoes. Edgar Degas
In Quatre danseuses, Degas took full advantage of the unique material properties of pastel to convey the buoyancy and translucency of gauze tutus, as well as the radiant color and artificial lighting of the stage. In order to achieve these illusory effects, the artist drew directly onto the paper with prefabricated sticks, then used his fingers to rub and blend the soft, powdery pigment. He also experimented with new tools and techniques; as art historian Richard Brettell observed, the pastels “were crumbled, dissolved in a rapidly drying medium and painted onto the paper. Degas worked into the pastel with liquid solvents, using both brushes and various stumps; he also ‘etched’ fine lines into the thick layers of pastel with knives” (quoted in ibid., p. 527). These unconventional ways of handing pastel contributed to the variegated surface texture of his later works.
People call me the painter of dancing girls. It has never occurred to them that my chief interest in dancers lies in rendering movement. Edgar Degas
In Quatre danseuses, dancers watch and wait for their turn to perform—or, perhaps, rest immediately after coming off stage. The quartet, wearing clementine-colored bodices with cobalt-blue tutus, is informally arranged in a diagonal line from the upper left corner to the lower right. While Degas’s composition may depict multiple ballerinas in a single moment, some art historians have argued that the subject is fact a single dancer adopting different poses over time, and that the artist conflated these sequential poses onto the space of the page. This interpretation is supported by the fact that the dancers wear identical costumes, have the same rich, chestnut-brown hair, and their facial and anatomical features are indistinguishable from one another.
Degas likely drew inspiration from the early experiments in chronophotography, which features multiple, consecutive snapshots of a figure moving through space on a single sheet in order to create the illusion of animation. Consider, for example, a plate titled Women from the British photographer Eadweard Muybridge's Animal Locomotion of 1887—which, like the present work, depicts a woman wielding a fan.
Degas also repurposed his own independent studies of ballerinas in order to create multi-figured compositions. The standing figure holding a fan at the center of Quatre danseuses, for example, can be traced to a pastel and charcoal sketch of a dancer in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. This dancer’s pose recurs in different media across the artist’s oeuvre, including the present work; here, she appears in combination with three other figures drawn from other individual studies. Though the composite group in Quatre danseuses is a fiction of the artist’s imagination, the figures nonetheless produce the effect of raw, organic spontaneity, due to their seemingly random, unselfconscious gestures.
Closely related pastels include examples in the Saint Louis Art Museum and Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford. These chromatic variations upon the same theme demonstrate the artist’s seemingly endless pursuit of perfection. The Saint Louis Art Museum’s Danseuses à l’éventail, for example, features the same arrangement as in Quatre danseuses. However, in the Saint Louis sheet, the composition is cropped along the right edge, so that the face of the dancer in the lower right corner is no longer visible; she also grips her calf, rather than her ankle ribbon. Additionally, the costumes differ in color from the present work: the dancers’ tutus are cerulean and lime, instead of orange and blue. In another related pastel at the Wadsworth Atheneum, the tutus are rendered in shades of lavender and marigold.
In this series, Degas used the triangular bulk of the ballerinas’ tutus and the wedge-shaped fans as vehicles for color; pastel clearly satisfied the artist’s voracious appetite for saturated hues. According to Julie Manet, the daughter of Berthe Morisot, Degas once described his work in this medium as “veritable orgies of color” (Growing Up with the Impressionists: The Diary of Julie Manet, New York, 1987, p. 177). At the third Impressionist exhibition in 1877, critics noted that Degas had largely abandoned oil painting on canvas in favor of this medium, which continued to dominate his artistic production for the next several decades. The instantaneity and flexibility of pastel suited Degas’s mercurial temperament, as well as his dynamic subject matter.
Even this heart of mine has something artificial. The dancers have sewn it into a bag of pink satin… slightly faded like their dancing shoes. Edgar Degas
In Quatre danseuses, Degas took full advantage of the unique material properties of pastel to convey the buoyancy and translucency of gauze tutus, as well as the radiant color and artificial lighting of the stage. In order to achieve these illusory effects, the artist drew directly onto the paper with prefabricated sticks, then used his fingers to rub and blend the soft, powdery pigment. He also experimented with new tools and techniques; as art historian Richard Brettell observed, the pastels “were crumbled, dissolved in a rapidly drying medium and painted onto the paper. Degas worked into the pastel with liquid solvents, using both brushes and various stumps; he also ‘etched’ fine lines into the thick layers of pastel with knives” (quoted in ibid., p. 527). These unconventional ways of handing pastel contributed to the variegated surface texture of his later works.