Degas and the Ballet at the Royal Academy

Degas and the Ballet at the Royal Academy

13 September, 2011
by: Tom Jeffreys

Tom Jeffreys is intrigued by the Royal Academy's radical exploration of Degas' relationship with photography.

The question of how to approach an artist of stature is a difficult one for any curator. On the one hand you're obliged at least to some extent to give your visitors what they came for, but on the other you also want to add new insight to a pre-existing body of knowledge. Fortunately, Richard Kendall and Jill DeVonyar, the curators of the big new Degas show at the Royal Academy, have struck that delicate balance pretty adroitly.

Degas and the Ballet draws on what the artist is best known for – paintings and drawings of ballerinas – and provides a grateful public with ballerinas by the truckload. But the exhibition also strikes out on its own, making a well thought out case for the relationship between Degas' work and the emergence of a new technology of image-making – photography.

Right from the start – three rotating dancers silhouetted against the walls of a darkened room – you know that Degas and the Ballet is going to be a little bit different. But from there, it's a largely chronological exhibition, albeit with plenty of subtle suggestiveness. Things get under way with a photograph of the artist himself, before the room opens out with a large selection of paintings and drawings from the 1870s. The images here largely focus on the rehearsal room and the studio, rather than the performance itself, and all are beautifully composed – in particular two entitled The Rehearsal, in one of which the artist's grid lines are still visible beneath the oils.

What's interesting here is not simply the relative lack of 'mere' prettiness – these are not the pampered ballerinas of the popular imagination – but also the strange way in which movement is depicted. There's a certain kind of grace, but more to the fore is the sense of tiring toil and effort. Most of these scenes contain an authority figure – either an elderly woman, a dark-clad male violinist or a man with a staff – and suggest, perhaps, that ballet is a profession by necessity.

It is this depiction of movement that chiefly concerns the curators of Degas and the Ballet. The argument the exhibition makes is that Degas' ability to capture movement changed and improved as new photographic technologies emerged. As with New Historicism in literary criticism, it's always hard to prove a causal correlation with this kind of thing, but the case put forward here is a compelling one. We see the artist's many-angled studies for the Little Dancer exhibited alongside photography in the round by contemporaries François Welleme and the crazy Nadar. Later, as Degas' technique develops, and he begins to depict multiple limbs and repeated contours of form in order to evoke motion, this is linked to the work done by Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey. Even Degas' long, thin paintings of the late 1870s and 1880s are linked to the emergence of the panoramic photograph.

Degas' purchase of his own camera in 1895 acts as something of a turning point in the exhibition – at least in terms of my understanding of it. Degas' own images are quite startling in their mysterious beauty, as are some of the contextual photographs, particularly one from a Lerolle family photo album. And in addition, suddenly we see images of Degas with the likes of Renoir and Stéphane Mallarmé. We learn of a visit from the young Paul Valéry.

It's at this stage that the direction of the exhibition becomes clear. For symbolist poets like Mallarmé and Valéry, the dancer was to become a key figure – a symbol of pure form, a purely formal symbol. For them, the dancer is movement, and the attempt to capture that sense of immediacy, of presence, in paint or words is always fascinating, always doomed to failure. As WB Yeats wrote later:
 
“O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?”

But there's also something lost. Whilst for Yeats, the dancer is rhetorically inseparable from the dance, in Degas' early works, what interests him is the dancer away from the dance: at rest or in rehearsal, the 'real' dancer in advance of the 'real' performance. Few works, for example, are as captivating as Study for L'Attente, an incredible little drawing that somehow captures, through a series frantic marks, a fizzing energy gradually uncoiling in repose.

The paintings of the 1870s are full of the personality of the individual – something that is gradually lost as the dancer ascends towards the level of the symbol. The last room makes this clear: beautiful, vivid pastel images, rich with jade and mauve and fiery orange. These are sumptious and poetic works, but also distant, and untouchable.

Degas and the Ballet is about a journey from Impressionism (although the artist himself shunned that word) towards Modernism – a journey inextricably bound up with technology. In exploring this very specific movement, Degas and the Ballet does an excellent job, but it can get overwhelming in its desire to prove the point. This is a very focused show and one that demands focus in return.

Degas and the Ballet is at the Royal Academy until 11th December 2011.

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Tom Jeffreys