Studio: international art (73.1918)

Edgar Degas

for a few brief moments makes them like to the the shining tinsel, of the dancer and the actress ;
priestesses of some millenary cult, of that worship and he was right, being above all a sincere and
of the Dance which is at the root of all the truthful witness, an artist honest and loyal,
ceremonials and all the religions of the ancients, to reveal these things to us, for they contain
and, at the same time, to let us retain the impres- within them a human beauty, often sad to
sion of what they are in their everyday life, of contemplate and full of bitterness, yet forming a
all that whereby they are only just women like lofty element of art for.such as can penetrate it
the rest, who, the play once over, will go back and convey its meaning to others. This is what
in their ordinary clothes to the humble little flat Degas did, and this it is that stamps his works
on a certain floor of a certain building: such is with so bold an impression, which gives them
the task the artist must achieve in order to style, and, in a word, constitutes them " classics."
produce, in treating a subject of this sort, the Want of space, and the necessity of confining
veritable work of art fit to stir us, fit to survive myself here to throwing light on the essential
the period that inspired it, like all the great characteristics of this most forceful and original
works of art of bygone days, which—I insist on it artistic personality, prevent me from doing more
purposely — remain for
ever the more living, the
more capable of enrap-
turing and captivating
us, because they are the
most sincerely, the most
faithfully, the most pro-
foundly representative
and expressive of the feel-
ing of the period when
they were conceived and
experienced and brought
into being.

Therein lies the high
worth of work like that
of Degas, quite apart
from the sometimes cruel
lessons of life it teaches,
and of which, indeed, it
provides the moral. The
man who signed these
pictures was not one of
those laughing philo-
sophers who hold, with
Pangloss, that " all is for
the best in the best of
worlds." He knew, by
experience or by intuition,
all the wretchedness and
suffering and vice screened
behind the footlights illu-
minating the spectacles
provided for the amuse-
ment of the people in the
great capitals, the spiritual
and material blemishes
lurking beneath the per- "danseuse a la barre" drawing by h. g. e. degas

functory, painted smiles, {By courtesy of MA* Durand-Rttet)

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