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Arts & Life
The Clarion \ February 26, 2020
Chloe's Crash Course
Degas' Dancers
By Chloe McGee
Arts & Life Editor
In the same way Monet’s name is
inseparable with waterlilies or Lautrec with
the Moulin Rouge, Degas’s dancers have
become an emblem of French Impressionism.
Like Degas, many of his contemporaries
were avant-garde artists drawn to Parisian
cultural aesthetics, but Degas refused to
adapt completely to the progressive art
movement.
Rejecting the “Impressionist” label. Degas
deemed himself an “Independent” artist.
Degas was deeply inspired by the great
masters, Raphael and Michelangelo, but
was enticed by Impressionism’s study of
light and color.
Degas’s pursuit to revive tradition while
also embracing the newfound artistic style
is essentially what granted him individuality.
Though his fascination towards human
form was shaped by his academic training.
Degas took an innovative approach to this
classical subject matter.
Degas sought to recreate the ambience of
ballet performances as a flaneur, inviting
the viewer to imaginatively experience
modernity, by recreating a fleeting moment
of light and color.
While many Impressionists preferred to
paint in plein air, Degas chose to work from
sketches and by memory in the traditional
manner.
“It is very good to copy what one sees;
it is much better to draw what you can’t
see any more but is in your memory. It is
a transformation in which imagination and
memory work together. You only reproduce
what struck you, that is to say the necessary,”
Degas wrote.
Degas’s eyesight began to fade in his
thirties, and he spent the last years of his
life almost entirely blind, forcing the artist
to rely heavily on his memory.
At a time when oil paint was widely
favored among Impressionist artists. Degas
was busy revitalizing neglected mediums.
He even experimented by mixing and
layering an array of different mediums
within a single composition.
Apiece that exhibits Degas’s blended style
is “The Star,” a pastel drawing that was
exhibited at the 1877 Troisieme Exposition
Impressioniste in Paris.
From an elevated perspective, a soloist
ballerina balances in an arabesque, illuminated
by the artificial glow of stage lights.
Degas’ captures this scene so vividly that
the dancer appears to embody the eternity
of movement rather than its duration. She is
not frozen in time; she is a symbol of time’s
continuation.
The dancer’s elegant gesture—the
relationship between every limb—is in
perfect harmony, giving the impression
that she was dancing, is dancing and will
continue to dance.
“The Star” is the quintessence of Degas’s
individualism as an artist. It is the marriage
between traditional and contemporary style
that secured Degas’s lasting impression on
art.
Edgar Degas, “The Star,” 1877, pastel