Also this issue: Trading Spaces Fleisher/Ollman Gallery celebrates a milestone anniversary with a change of location. -Susan Hagen Degas Vu The Art Museum transports you back to Degas' world. -Robin Rice 19th Annual Celebration of Black Writing -Elisa Ludwig Concerts for the Community -David Shengold Tango Buenos Aires -Deni Kasrel Jeanne Ruddy Dance -Deni Kasrel The Magic Flute -Steve Cohen The Dreyfuss Affair: A Love Story -David Anthony Fox

February 13-19, 2003

art

Ballet Lessons

A dance critic's perspective on “Degas and the Dance.”

by Janet Anderson

The "Degas and the Dance" exhibit isn't just this year's blockbuster gallery offering by our world-class Art Museum. Nor is it simply another lovely gathering of sunflowers or water lilies to satisfy the general public's unceasing interest in the group of visual artists loosely called impressionists. Yes, it's a gorgeously assembled and wonderfully organized exhibit and a feast for the eyes. Amazingly, it's also the first major exhibit to focus on Degas' primary subject: ballet.

An important artist could devote most of his life, and almost half of his thousands of art works, to ballet; yet endless art historical studies examine these works as records of Degas' technique, composition, use of color, fascination with movement, interest in working women, love of music or sexual attitudes. Any viewpoint is worth exploring, apparently, except the artist's own -- an intense immersion in classical ballet. Relegated to calendar art, Degas' dancers have been long overdue for serious consideration.

Part painter, part ethnographer, Degas lovingly recorded the details of ballet's enclosed world. His own handwritten notes identify ballet positions and steps on drawings. If not slumped in exhaustion, his dancers perform a virtual ballet manual of identifiable movements. Famous 19th-century ballet personalities teach and perform in studios, on stages and in productions all equally identifiable. Such a record of a particular art form in a particular time is unique.

Trivializing the Degas ballet images has happened in part because of attitudes about ballet itself. If you think of ballet as pretty girls in fluffy tutus, rather than as artists working endlessly to attain classical line and balance in codified steps and positions, then naturally the images will look like human sunflowers, skirts swirling like water lilies.

Thank you, Philadelphia Museum of Art, for bringing in curators who actually respect ballet. Jill DeVonyar is a ballet dancer as well as an art historian, and Richard Kendall raised the level of serious Degas ballet scholarship in an earlier exhibit, "Degas and the Little Dancer." At the opening, DeVonyar stood in front of a Degas drawing and demonstrated the dance line of the arabesque, showing where the weight and center was in her movement, and in Degas' image. There lies the nub of Degas and ballet -- the artist saw a dancer attempting to embody classical ideals with perfect centering and balance. The artist, by training and taste as much a classicist as impressionist, shared her goals.

-- Respond to this article in our Forums -- click to jump there