Feature: Exhibitions - Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement at the Royal Academy of Arts
Published: 26 May 2011
by JOHN EVANS
THE pictures by Edgar Degas in the Royal Academy’s autumn blockbuster will include some of his own photographic work.
The focus is on the development of his ballet imagery from the “documentary” 1870s to the more sensuous approach, with his use of delicate, multi-layered, pastels as his main medium, from the 1890s.
The exhibition will feature images of three surviving photographs the artist himself took of ballet dancers, held as fragile glass negatives by the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and too delicate to travel.
As the RA’s exhibition curator Ann Dumas explained, these study the dancers not in conventional, pretty, poses but provide an extraordinary insight into his fascination with, and knowledge of, the complex movement of his subjects.
They contrast with more formal photographic portraits the artist took of friends, which were carefully orchestrated.
The emphasis is on Degas (1834-1917) as innovative, radical, and acutely in tune with technological innovations. “He was, after all, one of the leaders of the Impressionist movement in the 1870s and their chief agenda was the artist as absolutely contemporary…,” said Dr Dumas.
About 85 paintings, sculptures, pastels, drawings, prints and the photographs, will be exhibited as well as contemporaries’ works and examples of early film.
The show will examine the links between the artist and experiments being made at the time by such figures as the photographer Jules-Etienne Marey, Eadweard Muybridge, and the Lumière brothers, film pioneers, Auguste and Louis.
Highlights will include the sculpture Little Dancer Aged Fourteen from Tate London, The Dance Lesson from Washington DC, Dancers in a Rehearsal Room with a Double Bass from the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, New York, and rare pastels, among them, Dancers of about 1899 from Princeton.
Dr Dumas said: “Degas… is the artist of the dance and it’s fascinating to wonder why he was really so obsessed with the subject. No other artist has been – to the same degree – before or since.”
We do know his fascination was more for the behind-the-scenes than the stage itself. And that, for whatever reason, male dancers do not feature at all.
• Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement is at the Royal Academy of Arts, Piccadilly, from September 17 until December 11.
Full price £14, concessions available. Advance booking telephone 0844 209 0051 or visit www.royalacademy.org.uk
Leonardo the Milan years
Advance tickets are on sale for Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan, the National Gallery’s landmark exhibition which opens on November 9 and runs until February 5 next year.
It brings together the largest ever number of his surviving paintings from the 1480s and 1490s, many never before in the UK. Included (left) is what the National says is “arguably his greatest masterpiece of these years,” Portrait of Cecilia Gallerani (The Lady with an Ermine), about 1489–90, oil on panel, 54.85 x 40.45 cm. She was the mistress of his patron and the city ruler Ludovica Maria Sforza.
• Full price tickets are £16. Call 0844 248 5097 or (booking fees apply)
visit www.nationalgallery. org.uk
You can also book by post or in person from the gallery.