MASP

Edgar Degas

Four Ballet Dancers on Stage, 1885-90

  • Author:
    Edgar Degas
  • Bio:
    Paris, França, 1834-1917
  • Title:
    Four Ballet Dancers on Stage
  • Date:
    1885-90
  • Medium:
    Óleo sobre tela
  • Dimensions:
    73 x 92 x 2,5 cm
  • Credit line:
    Doação Walther Moreira Salles, Simone Pilon, Jacques Pilon, Benedito Manhães Barreto, um comissário de café em Santos, Industriais da Juta de São Paulo, Diários Associados de São Paulo, 1950
  • Object type:
    Pintura
  • Inventory number:
    MASP.00082
  • Photography credits:
    João Musa

TEXTS



Degas’s first references were Ingres (1780-1867) and Edouard Manet (1832-1883), who oriented his painting toward the representation of modern themes. After France’s defeat in the war against Prussia (1870-71) and the events of the Paris Commune (1871), he traveled to New Orleans, his mother’s city of birth. He returned to Paris in 1873 and, disappointed with the official salons, joined with a group of young artists who began to be known as impressionists. Degas played an important role in the organization of the group’s eight exhibitions, held between 1874 and 1886. He was little taken to plein-air painting, preferring to study the movement of the human figure and that of animals, while also pioneering the use of the optical resources of photography. This is the case of Four Ballet Dancers on Stage (1885-90): the shadow on the arm of the central dancer is made with blue marks; the purple spots on her tutu highlight the pink hues and make them brighter by contrast; part of the face is green, thus blurring the facial expression while lending prominence to the gesture.

— MASP Curatorial Team, 2017





Having verified that Lemoisne’s catalogue, unusually, is short on references related to Four Ballet Dancers on Stage at the Masp, Camesasca lays down a dense network of references for each of the four figures, poses, or similar compositions (1987, pp. 96-97). From an analysis of these leads, I have concluded that compositions of dancers in close up visual fields, such as the work at the Masp, may be dated not from c.189o, as was previously thought, but at least five years before that. Moreover, and here it is worth quoting at length from the author, “the coloring tends to become more intense, both the oils and the pastels, creating increasingly large masses of complementary or discordant tones, accentuated by clearly defined passages tending to exclude sfumato. The bodies, coiled or stretching ìn poses which often are about to break into impulsive movements, consist of brusquely interrupted lines and planes. The subject’s narrative status is diminished and there is an accentuated contrast between figure and background, due to the ‘ton sur ton’ and because one color may fuse two bodies. The impression of space achieved goes beyond structure and from here on is only hinted at by the zigzag of the arabesque. In short, with the exploration of forms almost attenuated, since the question had been resolved, there is more focus on form, marking the transition from the focus on vision and the dynamics of the body in motion to the predominance of aesthetic problems. Perhaps all this was derived from mastery of drawing from memory as recommended thirty years before by Ingres.” Also a fine appreciation, and not contradictory, is the view posed by Aguilar (1991, p. 61) of the Four Dancers, “a sort of spiral whirls the dancer in blue off the screen, the essence of Ukiyo-e”. It should be noted that it is not the body that is in movement, but the sense of suspension, the void of its dynamism, which prevails in these figures, rather more reminiscent of French Classicism, and particularly of Poussin, than of modern kinetics. What Degas sought to do in the ballet brings him closer to Mallarmé in Crayonné au théâtre, which we will chance resuming here: “Seul principe! Et ainsi que resplendit le lustre, c’est-à-dire lui-même, l’exhibition prompte, sous toutes les facettes, de quoi que ce soit et notre vue adamantine, une oeuvre dramatique montre la succession des extériorités de l’acte sans qu’aucun moment garde de réalité et qu’il se passe, en fin de compte, rien”.

— Unknown authorship, 1998

Source: Luiz Marques (org.), Catalogue of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, São Paulo: MASP, 1998. (new edition, 2008).



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