Degas and The Ballet: Picturing Movement: Royal Academy of Arts, London , by Bruce Boucher September 17 – December 11th, by Bruce Boucher
Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement
Royal Academy of Arts, London
September 17 – December 11th
Curated by Richard Kendall, Curator at Large, The Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, USA; Jill DeVonyar, independent curator;
and Ann Dumas, Exhibition Curator, Royal Academy of Arts
Can anything new be said about Degas and the dance? Those beautiful pastels and oils of rehearsal studios, those figures framed by stage flats, the three-dimensional sculptures have all passed into the canon of art history, and they are as inseparably linked to Edgar Degas as are the subtexts of voyeurism and misogyny. But the Royal Academy’s current exhibition, Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement, aims for something new as its subtitle suggests. Of course, there is plenty to delight the eye with a spread of some eighty-five works by one of the most idiosyncratic of Impressionist artists, and the range of major loans—especially from private collections—is staggering as is the quality of the selection. This bounty is not surprising, given that Richard Kendall, probably the doyen of Degas specialists, is the chief curator; yet what makes this exhibition stand out among the generality of shows on Degas is that it contrives to mount two exhibitions at once: one on the artist’s obsession with the ballet and ballerinas, the other about the nineteenth-century’s obsession with deciphering locomotion.
The two themes crisscross and run parallel through the stately galleries of the Royal Academy, which are large enough to accommodate crowds without completely undermining the intimacy of most of the works displayed. The effect is aided by the low level of lighting required for drawings and pastels, which create a penumbra-like effect in most of the rooms. The main challenge faced by the organizers was how to break down a seemingly restricted theme, but it has been credibly met by topics that move chronologically across the painter’s career while focusing on issues such as mobile viewing, Degas as a photographer, or color and dynamism. Degas and the Ballet establishes connections between the newly established medium of photography and the painter’s oeuvre: one of his early paintings of dancers was tellingly characterized by a critic as “a photograph;” the innovative photographic studies of Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey in the 1880s were known to Degas; and he himself became an enthusiastic photographer in the last decade of his career. While the extent to which scientific studies of movement played a role in Degas’s art may be moot, the exhibition does make a strongly convincing case that the photography of animal locomotion was not only “in the air,” but also a central preoccupation of many artists and theoreticians

