DOI issue:
No. 302 (May 1918)
DOI article:Mourey, Gabriel: Edgar Degas
DOI Page / Citation link:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.21356#0135
Edgar Degas
that Degas set himself to depict—the danseuse
in her short skirt of gauze or spangled tulle,
amid the crude lights and shades that electricity
throws on artificial backgrounds of landscape
and fairy palaces ; he made himself the histori-
ographer, the perpetuator of the whole life of
the woman who dances on the stage. He has
pictured her in all her stages : the little beginner,
chlorotic and half-developed, taken to the class
by her mother, just as she was in the Famille
M ante ; the Dancer at her work, as in the whole
series of pictures with the Foyer de la Danse of
the Opera as their setting, in which the artist
has seized and painted sur le vif, with marvellous
exactitude, in all its intimacy, the curious and
picturesque aspects of a career which demands
of those who would master it effort so constant,
patience so methodical, physique of such high
resisting force. Then there is the Dancer at her
toilet, or resting during the entr'actes in her
dressing-room, or in the wings awaiting her turn
to go " in front," caught in the free-and-easy,
happy-go-lucky attitudes of the life that is
behind the curtain of the theatre. And in order
that this "documentation" should be absolutely
thorough, it was not enough for the artist who
had undertaken it to be equipped with that
acuteness of vision, that sureness of hand with-
out which one cannot be a great draughtsman—
he must also be a painter, and a really great
painter. To create, or rather to re-create,
around all those female forms in motion the
atmosphere—not only the material, if one may
so term it, but also the spiritual—in which they
move, that imponderable, luminous atmosphere
of theirs which adds to their fascination and
converts them, while they dance and while they
are expressing by their gestures something
superior to themselves, into so many living
works of art ; to show them both as they are in
reality, yielding to no convention, and also as
our fancy would have them be ; to show them
possessed and transformed by that sort of
mysterious and sovereign force of rhythm which
129
1
that Degas set himself to depict—the danseuse
in her short skirt of gauze or spangled tulle,
amid the crude lights and shades that electricity
throws on artificial backgrounds of landscape
and fairy palaces ; he made himself the histori-
ographer, the perpetuator of the whole life of
the woman who dances on the stage. He has
pictured her in all her stages : the little beginner,
chlorotic and half-developed, taken to the class
by her mother, just as she was in the Famille
M ante ; the Dancer at her work, as in the whole
series of pictures with the Foyer de la Danse of
the Opera as their setting, in which the artist
has seized and painted sur le vif, with marvellous
exactitude, in all its intimacy, the curious and
picturesque aspects of a career which demands
of those who would master it effort so constant,
patience so methodical, physique of such high
resisting force. Then there is the Dancer at her
toilet, or resting during the entr'actes in her
dressing-room, or in the wings awaiting her turn
to go " in front," caught in the free-and-easy,
happy-go-lucky attitudes of the life that is
behind the curtain of the theatre. And in order
that this "documentation" should be absolutely
thorough, it was not enough for the artist who
had undertaken it to be equipped with that
acuteness of vision, that sureness of hand with-
out which one cannot be a great draughtsman—
he must also be a painter, and a really great
painter. To create, or rather to re-create,
around all those female forms in motion the
atmosphere—not only the material, if one may
so term it, but also the spiritual—in which they
move, that imponderable, luminous atmosphere
of theirs which adds to their fascination and
converts them, while they dance and while they
are expressing by their gestures something
superior to themselves, into so many living
works of art ; to show them both as they are in
reality, yielding to no convention, and also as
our fancy would have them be ; to show them
possessed and transformed by that sort of
mysterious and sovereign force of rhythm which
129
1