Degas and the Ballet
Creative Salvage, Thursday 22 September 2011
Degas is popular, as much for his sweet chocolate box images of pretty ballet dancers as anything else.
His work encompasses so much more than this, and particularly his engagement and research into the movement of the human form. This fascination and exploration lasted a lifetime and was expressed through many mediums as this exhibition shows.
London’s Royal Academy is the first to present Degas’s progressive engagement with the figure in movement in the context of parallel advances in photography and early film. Degas was not only aware of these advances, but often directly involved in them. From 1895 Degas owned a camera and took portraits of his friends and fellow artists. Rather than being content with just taking representational images, he experimented with the camera to find its boundaries.
The exhibition explores the fascinating links between Degas highly original way of viewing and recording dance and the inventive experiments being made at the same time in photography by Etienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge and in film making by such pioneers as the Lumiere brothers.
As you enter the first, darkened room of the exhibition you are met with the moving shadow of a ballerina projected onto the wall. This is a copy of the Degas’s ballerina maquette, he placed on a turntable and shone light onto her creating a moving shadow on the wall behind. This experiment was commented on by Walter Sickert. Degas performing, an artist playing with film before it existed!
One of the reasons that the exhibition is on for such a short period of time and only in one gallery, is the fragility of the drawings. In order to protect them they are displayed in subdued light.
Originally it was felt that the drawings, with what appeared to be reworked and redrawn arms and legs were mistakes. It is now believed this was not the case, but the marks are expressions of movement as the limbs moved from one position to the next. When Degas died in 1917 hundreds of such drawings were found in his studio. These along with observation, would be put to use when Degas was composing his paintings.
Ex prima ballerina, Darcy Bussell CBE, and the exhibition’s ambassador, commented on how true to life are the moves, and how perfect the weight distribution, of the dancers displayed in the works.
The exhibition comprises paintings, pastels drawings and prints as well as photographs by his contemporaries and examples of early film. It has taken the curators Richard Kendall and Jill DeVonyar four years to put the exhibition together, loaning from amongst others The Tate Gallery London, Pushkin State Museum Of Art Moscow, The National Gallery of Art Washington, DC., Beyeler Museum Foundation Basel.
The exhibitions is be at the Royal Academy of Arts from Saturday 17th September 2011-Sunday 11th December 2011 10am –6pm daily. For further information call 020 7300 8000 or visit www.royalacademy.org.uk/events.
Creative Salvage is a blog on crafts and design on written by Juliet Bawden, who also writes for magazines on the same subject. Make, share, and explore your arty ambitions...
