National Gallery of Art to feature Degas ballet-themed creations

PanARMENIAN.Net - Capitalizing on the Kennedy Center musical Little Dancer, which will open on Oct. 25 and is inspired by Edgar Degas and the teen model who posed for him, the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. has scheduled an exhibit highlighting the French artist’s Little Dancer Aged Four.

(After Degas’ death, additional bronze casts were made of Little Dancer, one of which is owned by Leslie and Abigail Wexner and will be part of the family art exhibit set to open Sept.20 at the Wexner Center for the Arts.)

The National Gallery exhibit, on view Oct. 5 through Jan. 11, will include 11 additional ballet-themed creations by Degas: sculptures, oils and works on paper. All are from the National Gallery collections, with the exception of the Corcoran Gallery of Art’s The Dance Class (Ecole de Danse), a bright, busy oil painting crowded with young women preparing to rehearse. A couple of dancers descend into the studio on a spiral staircase that Alfred Hitchcock would have loved.

The dark underworld of the Paris Opera Ballet intrigued Degas more than what was happening onstage. In terms of artistry, he witnessed a low point in French dance, after the peak of romanticism in the 1840s and before the Ballets Russes arrived in the early 1900s.

He ignored the stars and focused on the unknowns. He was intrigued by the moment of becoming, as ancient Greek artists were fascinated by the unformed bodies of boy athletes that hinted at the potential for greatness. (One of Degas’ earliest paintings is Young Spartans Exercising, 1860.) Few artists before Degas paid any attention to the petits rats, the term by which the youngest students of the French academy are still known. They came from mostly poor families. They were pursued by patrons who didn’t have art on their minds.

Did Degas have more than art on his mind?

If anything illicit went on between him and his young models — including Marie van Goethem, who posed for Little Dancer — he was discreet about it. No evidence has come to light, said Kimberly Jones, the National Gallery’s associate curator of French paintings. That is telling, she added.

“Artists are horrible gossips.”

The dancers’ life that Degas memorialized in hundreds of works was one of dedication and passion. But it was also a life of drudgery and creepiness.

You needed a strong backbone to survive, and that is what he gave his Little Dancer.

The artist known for capturing so many subjects in motion — dancers, horses, nudes — froze his most famous work in upright stillness. He draws our eye to her firm spine by the way she throws her shoulders back, clasping her hands behind her, lengthening her torso. This isn’t a dance position; it’s a deviation, even a rebellion. She is opening and stretching her shoulders in a way that feels good to a dancer seeking a moment’s freedom from the dictates of technique.

Like her, Degas deviated from dictates. For the only sculpture displayed in his lifetime, he didn’t create a voluptuous figure in marble or bronze; he used beeswax over a steel armature to mold a skinny child with a soft belly. He had a Parisian dollmaker craft her head of human hair and her skirt of tulle and cotton netting.

In recent years, National Gallery of Art staff members have discovered through radiographs that he filled her skeleton with random junk. He stuffed her arms with paintbrushes; a metal spring is in her neck.

But is she truly still? The arms, hands and interlaced fingers are quiet. Look closely, though, and you’ll see that her right pinkie is slightly lifted, caught mid-wiggle.

“She’s timeless,” said Daphne Barbour, a senior object conservator at the gallery.

“She is more than 100 years old, but she is absolutely identifiable to us.”