Dance and Modern Art

Works by Edgar Degas, Georges Seurat, Everett Shinn and August Macke

Jul 2, 2009

The combination of the flair of theater and gracefully agile bodies in motion has made dance a longtime favorite subject of artists.

Edgar Degas may have disagreed with being labeled "the painter of dancers," but he nonetheless found the dance so inspiring that he focused on it for years and produced numerous ballet-related works. For Degas and other notable painters such as Georges Seurat, Everett Shinn and August Macke, the lithe and fluid actions of dancers on-stage and off proved to be both visually and aesthetically intriguing — and definitely worthy of recreating in art.

Edgar Degas and The Dance

French Impressionist Degas (1834-1917) is famed for his depictions of dancers, showing them in a dual light — both on stage and seeming to float through the air, yet also at practice and striving hard to create that very effect of beauty and grace. Degas’ keen interest in the human body gave his portrayals of dancers a deeper meaning, and a sense of the grueling hours of daily exercises and sheer strength needed to be a ballerina. Such works as The Dance Class, Tired Dancer and Dancers Practicing at the Barre offer views beyond the finished ballet on stage, while others like The Star and The Ballet Dancer show the final, costumed productions before an entranced crowd.

Degas’ expertise with the medium of pastels was also a great asset to his dancer portraits. Through the powdery yet solid pastel stick, Degas could recreate ethereal tulle skirts and pale faces and limbs along with vivid rushes of color. Degas’ dancers primarily came from the ballet troupe of the Paris Opéra Company, and the flexible endurance they had developed during their careers as ballerinas no doubt helped them pose for long stretches of time for the exacting artist.

Georges Seurat’s La Chahut

Henri Toulouse-Lautrec’s glimpses of Paris’ Moulin Rouge Can-Can dancers are quite well-known, but Lautrec’s fellow Frenchman and artist Georges Seurat (1859-1891) also depicted the celebrated high-kicking form in his circa 1890 painting La Chahut.

While Lautrec’s Can-Can dancers are provocatively limber, the Pointillist Seurat used his customary precise, finely placed dots of color to form a controlled yet intriguing work. La Chahut’s brown and sepia tones along with its smoother, rounded forms suggest a scene more from the 1920s than 1890. The perspective is from behind the musicians looking up at the stage, with possible sly glances from nearby men up the raised skirts of the Can-Can girls.

Everett Shinn’s Dancer in White Before the Footlights

Ashcan School artist Everett Shinn (1876-1953) is often called The American Degas because of his fascination for the theater and dance, and for his Degas-like similarities in showing the effects of stage light. Furthermore, like Degas, Shinn was skilled in the use of pastels. Shinn was also a member of The Eight group of artists, who were otherwise referred to as the Ashcan School for their portrayals of vivid early 20th century reality.

Like Degas, Shinn not only loved going to the theater and the ballet, but he also enjoyed dressing up for the event and observing the other patrons around him. In works like Dancer in White Before the Footlights (1910), the suspension of reality on stage is never truly suspended, with harsh lighting and thick stage makeup exposed to the viewer’s eye. There is still an exciting energy to Shinn’s dance and theater paintings, however, perhaps because of his ability to reveal the humanity behind the illusion.

In the case of Shinn’s Dancer in White, the dancer herself is not the painting’s full focal point but is instead part of a scene which includes stylishly-hatted female audience members and orchestra musicians. The dancer‘s shimmering white costume and motions on stage are therefore enjoyable — but not completely exclusive to the collective experience of watching the performance.

August Macke’s Ballet Russes

German Expressionist and Der Blaue Reiter member August Macke (1887-1914) created many striking works before his untimely death in World War I. Macke’s 1912 Ballets Russes captured a scene from a production staged by the vibrant Russian ballet troupe of the same name, a group which involved such dance luminaries as Sergei Diaghilev and Vaslav Nijinsky, composer Igor Stravinsky and artists Leon Bakst and Pablo Picasso — to name just a few of the company’s many talents.

In Macke’s Ballets Russes painting, the innovative style of the troupe is mirrored by Macke’s colorfully innovative approach, which manages to combine a kind of whimsical tone with the sinuous joint motion of the harlequin dancer and his black-tighted partner. Macke also opted for an audience-view perspective, and like Shinn he shows women in hats and other spectators in their seats — although Macke’s audience seems far more focused on the performance, perhaps due to the captivating power of the Ballets Russes itself.

Sources

The copyright of the article Dance and Modern Art in Modern Art History is owned by Meg Nola. Permission to republish Dance and Modern Art in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.