Degas and the Ballet - Picturing Movement. Royal Academy of Arts

I visited this exhibition during the October half term, as part of a visit to London linked to this course (see blogs on Martin and Flanagan)

The exhibition was divided into 10 sections;

·         Introduction

·         Describing the dance

·         Mobile viewing

·         The panoramic gaze

·         The human animal

·         The dancer in movement

·         Degas the photographer

·         Dagas’s late years; the animated figure

·         Colour and dynamism

·         Coda

‘This exhibition explores Dagas fascination with movement for the first time, presenting some of the most remarkable pictures and sculptures of the dance created over his long career’  (Exhibition guide – section 1)

To be faced with so many pictures of the same subject area could run the risk of being monotonous, but not in this case. Whilst the subject was dance and the ballet the complexity of some paintings e.g The Rehearsal and the beautiful simplicity of others e.g. Study of legs kept me fully engaged.

There were a number areas that stood out for me, the first being the sculpture Little Dance Aged Fourteen, I have seen this piece before, but it was exhibited with the following paintings/sketches

·         3 studies of a nude dancer

·         3 studies of a dancer in the 4^th position

·         3 studies of a dancer

·         2 studies of a dancer

·         5 studies of a pair of legs

3 studies of a dancer

5 studies for a pair of legs

3 studies of a nude dancer

On one wall of this gallery the curators had ‘copied and split’ the seventeen images from the paintings listed above and placed them around and image of the Little Dancer to show how Dagas had moved around  his model.... ‘Contrary to his usual practice, here it is the ballerina who remained still while the artist himself became an observer in movement’ (Exhibition Guide – section 3)

Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen
Painted bronze with muslin and silk
Tate

One aspect of the exhibition that fascinated me related to the work of Muybridge, Marley and Richer, all of whom were interested in movement and the form of the human body. Muybridge and Marley used developing photographic techniques to show how movement took place. Richer was an anatomist, physiologist and sculpture.

Examples of their work were on display,  two bronzes by Marley, Flight of a Gull 1887 and Progressive Stages of the Flight of a Pigeon 1887, and The Race – Group of Three Runners, by Richer. ( I have been unable if locate any images of these, but have located a series of photographs of a bird which provides an idea of how the sculptures looked and an image of a sculpture of  two athletes by Richer)

Two athletes

Dagas was aware of the work of these three and in fact he made a number of drawings from Muybride’s ‘photographs of horses and female nudes, and some of his sequences of dancers seem to reflect Muybridge’s published imagery’ (Exhibition guide section 5).
Towards the end of his life Degas was once asked why he always painted ballet dancers, he replied that 'it is all that is left us of the combined movements of the Greeks' (pg 30 Observer review 18.09.11)...in ballet Degas found an in an inexhaustible source for his modern classicism with its emphasis on the body' (Laura Cumming Observer Review 18.09.11)

I thoroughly enjoyed this exhibition, there was a wonderful balance between his paintings and sketches and the 'new photographic techknowledgy' with an emphasis on how the two were interrelated.