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I speak of the past, for it seems to me that everything is growing
older in me - except my heart. And even my heart has something artificial
about it. The dancers have sewn it into a pink silk sachet, slightly faded
pink silk, like their ballet slippers.
Edgar Degas, letter to the sculptor Albert Bartholome, 17 January 1886
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Built between 1862 and 1865
near the Madeleine, the Paris Opera — then, the world's largest opera
house — covers an area of 11,000 square metres. Behind an exuberant
facade, decorated with allegorical figures, the auditorium seats 2,200.
The artist
Edgar Degas,
who lived three streets away near rue Le Peletier, did not require a
season ticket. By the 1860s, this witty and entertaining painter, who
could also be stubbornly intransigent when he so desired, had discovered
ballet as his genre. Because he knew several members of the orchestra, he
had access to the sacrosanct world backstage. Nearly every day the
Frenchman sat on or behind the stage. Early on he had become interested in
motifs drawn from urban life, painting workaday scenes of women ironing,
passers-by in the streets and men in bars, as well as the pleasures of the
Parisian racecourse or circus scenes. However,
Degas,
who was the son of an aristocratic banker of Italian descent and a New
Orleans Creole, found artistes and prostitutes common but
intriguing. What the Moulin Rouge was to
Toulouse-Lautrec,
the rehearsal room with its ballerinas was to
Degas.
In those days the Pans Opera Ballet — not to mention
more illustrious names — was waning in the firmament of the
Parisian cultural scene. Choreographers were running out of ideas and the
public was not satisfied with what the Opera Ballet had to offer. But the
quality of the productions was of no consequence to
Degas,
who was concerned with movement, speed and the enchantment of ballet. In
his paintings, he captured the elegance and delicate grace of ballet with
an unprecedented keenness of observation. Tragically, by 1870, his
eyesight was beginning to fail. As if to record as much as he could on
canvas before it was too late,
Degas
painted ever more feverishly to freeze every gesture, every pose of his
ballerinas:
dancing on points, performing pas de deux or taking their curtain
call, their tutus a froth of effervescence. He was even more fascinated by
what went on behind the scenes. The pictures in which he captured
ballerinas pulling up their tights, or fiddling with the laces of their
slippers, are like snapshots taken by a hidden camera. He was not above
depicting the darker side of dancing: ballerinas at the bar rubbing their
ankles because they hurt or resting their heads on their arms in sheer
exhaustion.
Degas
knew how to make even such moments of weariness enchanting. He introduced
yet another first to painting: the effects of modern lighting. He was the
first painter to study and exploit the effects of the mixture of natural
and artificial light, like that of the setting sun and gas lanterns. The
result was a painted twilight as it had never been seen before.
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