Out of pastels: Degas’ dance repertoire

Out of pastels: Degas’ dance repertoire
“Drawing is not the same as form, it is a way of seeing form.” Edgar Degas.[J. D. McClatchy “Masters” in Twenty Questions (Columbia University Press, 1 Apr 1999 - Literary Criticism) 173. ]
Degas developed mastery in depicting movement as identified in his rendition of dancers as well as female nudes. The portraits associated with Degas are characteristic of psychological complexity as well as their portrayal of human isolation. Degas was an expert in capturing fleeting movement within his numerous works by use of a series of pastels, paintings, drawings as well as monotypes and ultimately wax sculpture and photography.[Shelley, Marjorie. "A Disputed Pastel Reclaimed for Degas: Two Dancers, Half-Length." Metropolitan Museum Journal 51, no. 1 (2016): 128-145.]
Degas's paintings were commonly associated with inherent movement and action with his method considered to be the exact opposite of the Impressionists. He experimented with new techniques (monotype) as well as revitalised rather neglected mediums (pastel and gouache) thus achieving effects foreign to oil paint. At the same time, he tried to find out the alternatives that could replace traditional gilt frames. These actions encompass the act of revolutionizing his environment on the framing of subjects within the composition and addressed the immediate environment of the picture that includes the décor as well as the lighting of the room exhibition.[Thomson, Richard. Edgar Degas: Waiting. Getty Publications, 1995.]
Although Degas experimented with a range of mediums that even include photography, my scope of analysis is centred on his pastels works. These offered him the possibility of simultaneous line and colour. It also allowed him to be at his utmost innovative which he frequently used in combination with monotype, softening them over steam or mixing them with a fixative to form a paint-like paste which he could then work into with a stiff brush or his fingers.
Degas’s response to the ballet was founded on the notion of incessant work: physical exercises on the part of the dancer, finding form on the part of the artist. The art form served as subject for a good half of Edgar Degas’s prolific output as an artist. These iterations of dancers and their métier originated from his exhibit at the salon of 1868, with the “portrait on stage” of Mademoiselle Fiocre (Fig.1) and continued through the schematic drawings made until the dawn of his career around 1910. His interest in ballet dancers thus intensified from the 1870’s and rendered the production of approximately 1,500 works on the subject. The majority of which are studies that address the movement of the human body, exploring the physicality and discipline of the dancers through the use of contorted postures and unexpected vantage points.
Fig. 1
Degas believed in committing a subject to memory through repeated drawing, and when he felt he had arrived at a full understanding of it he would synthetize his many studies into a thought-out composition.
In some instances, his heavily pigmented charcoal drawings could be passed through the press that resulted in an inverse proof. This was done to transfer the excess pigment onto the new surface. Degas majorly used Roche pastels, especially while working on the series of ballet dancers. It is important to note that the media used by Degas included painting, drawing, and sculptures. His unique pastel art techniques enabled him to create dynamic images that seem to be in motion. The initial stages of his pastel work entailed the creation of rough sketches of the subject by the use of sharpened hard charcoal. These sketch lines were partially revealed by Degas through toning by colours. He laid down patches of colour in big masses by use of Nupastel sticks with a focus on the dark and middle tones. Then later he could use the semi-soft as well as soft pastels for the building up of layers of colours. Then the use of fixative served the purposes of spraying the parts of the painting, using more on the dark passages to help in making it darker, by which Degas proposed a reality that captured the repetitive nature of the dancer. Art became a work of obsessive analysis: His most remarkable breadth of work came out of his fascination with form (inherited from realism) and revelatory truth of anatomical changes in dancers’ bodies (articulation of limbs and torso), including la deformation professionelle.[Matz, Jesse. Lasting Impressions: The Legacies of Impressionism in Contemporary Culture. Columbia University Press, 2017.]
Artistic representation
Degas’ balletic oeuvre denies the illusion and fantasy produced on stage, he aimed to evoke reality though numerous studies of musculature and arduous positions that served him to later produce the stage illusion on a finished canvas. He thoroughly studied the vocabulary of ballet technique so as to further comprehend the secrets of their muscular actions and their physical responses to the strict regime of ballet training. These notations are often featured in his charcoal and pencil drawings, which ultimately became the vehicle by which the artist was able to reveal the truth of form. His technique evolved with practice, Degas’ artistic aims were complex, and he wished to produce beauty and mystery. This reinvention of aesthetics, in a modern idiom (i.e. medium) was quite radical and situates him in a paradox between academia and new artistic expressions indebted to Ingres, and photography. His use of powered pigments in the form of dry sticks, contributed towards the unique appearance of his works.
Degas's primary point of interest in the representation of ballerinas was the contrast between their ethereal grace on stage and the taxing physical realities behind these movements. Through his meticulous observation, Degas’ sketches are capable of depicting the physical and physiological toil beyond the artifice of the stage. His most studied iterations were of dancers in their natural habitat: The backstage Opera. He would often draw them at an untimely moments while they fasten a slipper or after an exhaustive practice session. Degas stripped the dancers of their glamour, showing them devoid of artifice.
These experimentations served him as the ultimate working tool that allowed him to elaborate effortlessly expressive drawings, elaborate a working symbiosis with his seaters and further explore his ideas on stasis and dynamism. Some of which led some of his latter iconic sculptures (La petite danseuse) (Fig. 2) and paintings (the ballet rehearsal 1974-76). (Fig. 3)
Fig. 2.
Fig. 3
Dance rehearsals and classes were an important tool for Degas, who took them as an opportunity to study the body in both stasis and motion. His knowledge on the art form aided him to choreograph his the depictions of dance, the slump of the woman’s shoulders alongside the downcast eyes is the only necessity to tell the whole story. Degas’ works always utilized the figure and space relationships within the paintings, therefore, they applied the use of edges of the given tables to lead the audience's eyes direct to the woman. The placement of the dark figure next to the woman does the effective work of keeping the audience away from looking past the woman and out of the painting.[Shelley, Marjorie. "A Disputed Pastel Reclaimed for Degas: Two Dancers, Half-Length." Metropolitan Museum Journal 51, no. 1 (2016): 128-145.]
A number of ballet rehearsals were painted by Degas as well as performance scenes. For instance, the Dance Class of 1871 that allowed Degas to put his skills to test by daring new context. In this scenario, the world of the Paris Opera was the centre of the sexual intrigue alongside a high glamour. Degas in this case, cleverly directed the scenario at his audience in the choice of the subject matter; for instance, his view of the backstage activities he conspicuously made them casual and also occasionally scurrilous. The numerous subsequent painting of the dancers were depicted as backstage that focused on their status as professionals. Degas encouraged other artists to indulge in the painting of real life instead of focusing on traditional, mythological or historical-artistic works. In line with this, he showed an example by painting a few literary scenes which were a representation of the modern that included highly ambiguous content.[Ibid] [Shelley, Marjorie. "A Disputed Pastel Reclaimed for Degas: Two Dancers, Half-Length." Metropolitan Museum Journal 51, no. 1 (2016): 128-145.]
Degas’ drawings from the decades of 1870-1880painted the reality of the studio via the effects of light, infusing their scenes with a sense of immediacy. These works comprise several studies of dancers adjusting their shoes, their costumes or practicing in different poses. All are show from different angles. These drawings not only served as preparatory studies for his ballet scenes of the same period, but also demonstrated Degas's approach and relationship to his models.
The conventional historical paintings done by Degas such as The Daughter of Jephthah and The Young Spartans present gradual progress focusing on a less idealized treatment of the figures. The works of Degas also presented the existing tension between men and women through ambitious and psychologically poignant portrayal. The many subsequent paintings show dancers backstage that more so emphasizes their status of doing professional jobs. The aspect of using the dark palette that represented the influence of Dutch painting infused Degas’ vivid insights proposed by his use of colour, indebted to impressionism.
Degas saw and recorded dancing with a neurotic retinae. But it is through his drawings that he is able to reveal the truth of nuanced musculature as well as extraordinary articulation of a dancer’s body, another
the immediacy of a woman’s physical identity, her musculature, even the idea of “deformation professionnelle” which comes from training, and how Degas was able to portray it.
Such changes that also included the sense of composition are evidential of the impact of impressionist movement as well as modern photography on the spontaneous images of his work.[Shelley, Marjorie. "A Disputed Pastel Reclaimed for Degas: Two Dancers, Half-Length." ]
Degas also saw and recorded dancing through Unusual vantage points and asymmetrical framing, which are consistent throughout his oeuvre, especially in his Opera iterations, from the time of Dancers Practicing at the Barre(1877), through the decades to Dancers, Pink and Green (ca. 1890;) and beyond. He achieves modern effects by disrupting the compositional balance.
Because of the myriad iterations of painted and drawn dancers he elaborated for decades, his ability to capture and render movement was progressively improved. So was his experimentation with asymmetrical and cropped compositions which reflect the influence of Japanese prints and in provide a sense of immediacy, by giving the viewer a sense of being placed in the scene. This is where we find the fascinating quality of Degas creative responses to ballet: his studies of motion, where the medium is at the helm in rendering a human figure in movement and parallel the everlasting routine of a dancer whose practice perfects technique.
Concerning the pastel techniques used by Degas in his paintings, he usually applied the use of dark brown surfaces for pastel drawings. In some instances, these surfaces are identified to have had a lot of texture. Most of Degas's paintings are identified to have turned darker over time since they were not acid-free. There was also the use of fixative to darken or rather seal the pigments. This presents the reason as to why some of the works look quite dark with dull colours. Some of the main techniques applicable to mixing colours include hatching as well as crosshatching. In this case, Degas applied scumbling with the use of light opaque colours over dark colours to unify and mix the colours optically. At the same time, Degas often used tools such as knives to scratch the painting to produce a sgraffito effect. Degas's pastel techniques show his ruthless actions with the various medium that he worked on.[Matz, Jesse. Lasting Impressions: The Legacies of Impressionism in Contemporary Culture. Columbia University Press, 2017.]
Degas technique changed alongside the subject matter whereby the dark palette influenced by the Dutch painting allowed the use of vivid colours as well as bold brushstrokes. Some of the paintings depicted the freezing moments of time that eventually depicted their accuracy on imparting the sense of movement. The various changes were clear show and evidence of the nature of influence that contemporary photography, as well as Impressionist movement alongside spontaneous images, had on Degas works. The mature style with which he portrayed his works could be identified by conspicuously unfinished passages in all his paintings. However, such unfinished passages were associated with his blurred vision.
Medium: Carbon drawings vs. pencil drawings vs. pastels drawings
In the use of the medium, there is a record showing that Degas recorded a number of arts that he saw in many places he visited through cautious and delicate pencil strokes. For instance, the representation of the copy of the head of Christ that was from Leonardo’s paintings, referred to as the Virgin of the Rocks was done by the use of pencil drawing. In this case, Degas copied only a part of the picture that represented the whole of the composition. He applied the use of long diagonal parallel hatching strokes that was a reproduction of Leonard’s pervasive sfumato. Later, Degas started using in his paintings swift ink lines, washes as well as watercolour accents alongside the rapid diagonal hatching for more expressive chiaroscuro. The use of pastels helped in the achievement of brighter and more vivid colours of Degas's works. Degas had the capability of con...