Edgar Degas was a conflicted artist torn between traditional academic art and the radical art movements of the late nineteenth century.
A friend and poet, Paul Valéry, once described Degas as, “divided against himself; on the one hand driven by an acute preoccupation with truth, [while]; on the other hand, possessed by a rigorous spirit of classicism.”
Danseuse bleue (Avant la classe, trois danseuses), Blue Dancer (Before Class, Three Dancers) reveals Degas’ duality — a carefully rendered pastel drawing of an unguarded moment that contrasts the elegance of the ballet.
Though Degas experimented with a variety of media — including oil and gouache paint, printmaking, wax modeling, and photography — pastel became his preferred medium by the 1880s, using its speed to expressively build vivid, velvety colors.
Working closely with his friend, Luigi Chialiva, Degas developed a pastel fixative, which allowed him to layer different hues of pastel, one on top of the other without disturbing the underlying drawing.
Through this unique technique, Degas’ pastels combine the functions of line and color in pursuit of the pictorial.
These methods earned Degas comparisons with his Impressionist contemporaries like Claude Monet, but Degas considered himself more of a realist focusing on the fringes of Parisian life: alcoholics, laundresses, milliners, and prostitutes.
By the late nineteenth century, Degas was obsessed with the Paris Opera Ballet and dancers, and the sexual intrigue of the backstage room or “foyer de la danse.”
Though Degas’ work is often viewed as a romantic and tender portrayal of ballet dancers, these are dark voyeuristic scenes of vulnerable girls.
Degas worked to remove the poetry of the ballet, exposing the hypocrisy of fashionable Paris and the sophistication of the upper class.
Known as a “painter of dancers,” Degas once wrote a sonnet to the dancers in 1889, reciting, “One knows that in your world / Queens are made of distance and greasepaint.”
