The Ballet and Edgar Degas

Few artists have ever explored a subject so exhaustively as Edgar Degas and ballet. From the 1870s on, the artist produced around 1,500 works starring the famous dancers of Paris. His work is best remembered today for its attention to movement and the realism of its subjects. Rather than the performance itself, Degas focused on the gritty realities of training, rehearsal, and life backstage. His extensive works give us a unique look into the world of ballet a century ago, as well as the thousands of women who gave everything to pursue it.

Ballet came to France from Renaissance Italy, most notably through the famous Queen Catherine de Medici. At first, ballet was simply a noble pastime. Kings, queens, and courtiers donned elaborate costumes and performed their steps with the help of dancing masters. Their dance entered the mainstream alongside opera in the 17th century. In 1661, the first formal ballet school, the Académie Royale de Danse, opened in Paris and began to train the first ballerinas. There and at the Paris Opera, Classical Ballet developed into its recognizable form. Costumes grew lighter, stages grander, and the movements more dramatic and athletic. Both male and female dancers sought perfection in motion--discipline honed into floating leaps and subtle expressions.

While it grew as an art, ballet also matured as an industry, a rare opportunity for European women to pursue an artistic profession. Competition for training and roles could be fierce, and the pay was minimal. Because of this, many ballerinas relied on a predatory “patronage” system supported by wealthy admirers. This gave dancers a poor reputation among the public, who enjoyed their performances while also condemning them as sinful.

By the 1870s, when Degas took an interest in the art, ballet’s influence had declined somewhat in France. Innovation shifted to the theaters of Russia, where tsars sponsored the dance in a push to modernize their empire. Russian Ballet produced masterpieces like Swan Lake and The Nutcracker and has contributed significantly to modern dance. A performance of Swan Lake, composed by Tchaikovsky in 1875, can be viewed below:

Degas, meanwhile, immersed himself in the more settled world of Parisian ballet and opera. By then, opera and ballet were enjoyed by the public as well as the upper classes. Wealthy patrons bought subscriptions for better seats and entry to luxurious backstage areas, where they could mingle freely with the ballerinas. Degas, upper class but not quite so well off, relied on subterfuge, early photographs, and studio models to paint his subjects until the late 1880s.

Perhaps Degas’s most controversial work was not a painting, but a statue: the Little Dancer Aged Fourteen. Not much is known about his subject, Marie van Goethem, a daughter of poor Belgian immigrants to Paris. She spent several years training as one of many “opera rats,” the petits rats de l'opéra. Just a few years later, she would leave the ballet and vanish into history. Her life was likely hard, thankless, and vulnerable to exploitation, captured for a brief moment in a statue derided at the time as “ugly” and a “bestial effrontery.” Her story survived only through Degas’s art; how many young women like her have been forgotten?

Given our romantic, modern view of ballerinas, it can be hard to imagine such a negative response to the Little Dancer. But even Degas, with his focus on the real women of ballet, showed little sympathy for his subjects. As we look back on ballet’s heyday, we owe it to these performers to not only admire their grace and athleticism, but to remember the human price they paid for beauty.

Sources

Schenkel, Ruth. “Edgar Degas (1834–1917): Painting and Drawing.” The Met, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oct. 2004, www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/dgsp/hd_dgsp.htm.

Vollard, Ambroise. Degas: An Intimate Portrait. Dover, 1986.

Laurens, Camille. Little Dancer Aged Fourteen. Other Press, 2018.

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