Julia Fiore
Edgar Degas, The
Rehearsal of the Ballet Onstage, ca. 1874. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum
of Art.
The fundamentals of ballet haven’t changed all that much since its
invention in 15th-century Italy. Yet the popular image of this deeply
traditional medium has been largely defined by the talents of one thoroughly
modern artist: Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas.
The coteries of young women in flowering tutus who populate the
approximately 1,500 paintings, monotypes, and drawings Degas dedicated to the
ballet are among the French artist’s most universally beloved artworks. At
first glance, Degas has rendered the sort of pretty, innocent world one might
associate with a 6-year-old’s first recital. These works actually speak to an
insidious culture that would be shocking to contemporary audiences.
Although it enjoyed unprecedented popularity
in Degas’s era, the ballet—and the figure of the ballerina—had suffered a
demoralizing fate by the late 1800s. Performances had been reduced to tawdry interludes in operas, the
spectacle serving as an enticing respite for concertgoers, who could ogle the
dancers’ uncovered legs.
The formerly upright ballet had taken on the role of unseemly
cabaret; in Paris, its success was almost entirely predicated on lecherous
social contracts. Sex work was a part of a ballerina’s reality, and the city’s
grand opera house, the Palais Garnier, was designed with this in mind. A
luxuriously appointed room located behind the stage, called the foyer de la
danse, was a place where the dancers would warm up before performances. But it
also served as a kind of men’s club, where abonnés—wealthy male subscribers to
the opera—could conduct business, socialize, and proposition the ballerinas.
These relationships always involved an unbalanced power dynamic.
Young female members of the corps de ballet entered the academy as children.
Many of these ballerinas-in-training, derisively called “petits rats,” came
from working-class or impoverished backgrounds. They often joined the ballet to
support their families, working grueling, six-day weeks.
And so dancers’ earnings and careers were beholden to the abonnés
prowling backstage. They were expected to submit to the affections of these
subscribers, and were frequently encouraged by their own mothers to fan the
flames of male desire. Such relationships could offer lifelines for the
impoverished dancers; not only did these aristocrats and financiers hold
powerful positions in society, their patronage underwrote the opera’s
operations.
Men like these had authority over who obtained plum roles and who
was cast off. As a girl’s “patron,” he could provide her with an opulent
lifestyle, paying for a comfortable apartment or private lessons to elevate her
standing in the ballet corps. The brothel culture of the ballet was so
pervasive, as historian Lorraine Coons remarks in her essay “Artiste or
coquette? Les petits rats of the Paris Opera ballet,” that even successful
dancers who did not resort to prostitution would likely have been suspected to
have done so anyway.
The sexual politics that played out in the foyer de la danse was of
great interest to Degas. In fact, very few of his depictions of the dance show
an actual performance. Instead, the artist hovers behind the wings, backstage,
in class, or at a rehearsal. In works like L’Étoile (1878), he depicts the
curtain call at the end of the performance, with the curtsying dancer bathed in
the unflattering glare of the lights. Behind her, a man in an elegant black
tuxedo lurks in the wings, his face hidden by the goldenrod curtain. Such
sinister figures also appear in works like Dancers, Pink and Green (ca. 1890).
Sometimes, the viewer himself is thrust into the leering perspective of the
abonnés: In Dancers at the Old Opera House (ca. 1877), the action onstage is
seen from behind the curtain.
“People call me the painter of dancing girls,” Degas once explained
to Parisian art dealer Ambroise Vollard. “It has never occurred to them that my
chief interest in dancers lies in rendering movement and painting pretty
clothes.” But Degas didn’t care tremendously about the ballet as an art form,
let alone frilly pastel tutus. He endeavored to capture the reality of the
ballet that lurked behind the artifice of the cool, carefully constructed
choreography.
This was in keeping with Degas’s broader
interest in the harsh realities of modern life. Despite his association with the Impressionists, a group that had a
profound influence on his work, Degas preferred to be called a realist. He
favored scenes of ballet dancers, laundresses, milliners, and other members
from the lower echelons of Parisian society. Urban subjects cast in harsh,
artificial light distinguished his works from the bright, leisurely plein air
paintings by artists such as Claude Monet. And while Monet focused his
attentions primarily on the effects of light and color, Degas obsessed over
capturing the body in motion.
Degas’s decision to avoid bonny, sentimental
pictures, however, was a canny one for an artist who strove for originality.
“The visual language of compassion was unusable for any serious artist in the
1870s and ’80s,” Germaine Greer observed in The Guardian, “because the public
art of the period oozed sentiment. Pretty beggars and plump rosy little girlies
with tears in their eyes were as often to be encountered then, as fluffy
kittens are today.”
One of Degas’s most famous depictions of a
dancer comes not in the form of a painting, but a wax sculpture—a tactile
medium that suited the 40-something artist as his eyesight began to fade.
Little Dancer Aged Fourteen (1878–81), a life-size statue of a teenage “petit
rat,” was only exhibited once in the artist’s lifetime, and the great scandal
it caused deterred Degas from ever exhibiting his sculptures again.
Before the Ballet
Edgar Degas
Before the Ballet, 1890/1892
National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
The Little Dancer was originally presented
quite differently from how she appears today. Degas dressed her up in a real
tutu, bodice, stockings, and pointe shoes. She also had on a pig-tailed wig
with a green bow, and another ribbon tied around her neck. Some critics
compared it to Madame Tussaud’s waxworks. “Can art descend lower?” one
anonymous writer asked. Art critic Paul Mantz described the dancer as a “flower
of precocious depravity,” with a “face marked by the hateful promise of every
vice.” Mantz further exposed the prejudice against ballet dancers in general:
“With bestial effrontery,” he wrote, “she moves her face forward, or rather her
little muzzle—and this word is completely correct because the little girl is
the beginning of a rat.”
Marie van Goethem was the “petit rat” who
posed for the sculpture, and she likely engaged in the sexually predatory
economy of the ballet world to survive. Van Goethem disappeared from the public
eye shortly after the sculpture was completed; after being late to a rehearsal,
the Paris Opera Ballet dismissed her. The teenager probably returned home to
follow in the footsteps of her mother—a laundress and likely prostitute—and
older sister, who was also a sex worker.
Life was cruel to French ballet dancers, and
they didn’t have it much easier at the hands of Degas himself. Although the artist
was known to reject the advances of his models, his callousness manifested in
other ways. To capture the physicality and discipline of the dancers, Degas
demanded his models pose for hours at a time, enduring excruciating discomfort
as they held their contorted positions. He wanted to capture his “little monkey
girls,” as he called them, “cracking their joints” at the barre. “I have
perhaps too often considered woman as an animal,” he once told the painter
Pierre Georges Jeanniot in a moment of revealing honesty.
Degas was undoubtedly a merciless, cantankerous man. He was a
misogynist—peers seemed almost afraid of his antagonism towards women—an
especially troubling reputation considering the already sexist norms of his
society. Contemporary viewers now delight in the artist’s profoundly evocative
hand and brilliant, textural applications of color. While it’s possible to
admire Degas’s dancers from a formal standpoint, this narrow appreciation
ignores the abuse these sorry girls suffered. A closer look at these works
shows how the painter did indeed cut through the ballet’s kitschy artifice,
uncovering a milieu of misery, hardship, and raw beauty.
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-sordid-truth-degass-ballet-dancers