Hear curator Megan Fontanella discuss how Degas captured these dancers in a private moment backstage.
Transcript:
Megan Fontanella: This is Paris in the late 19th century. It’s the excitement of the broad boulevards, the café scenes, the opera, and the races. And ballerinas were very much a part of this.
Narrator: The French artist Edgar Degas drew and painted dancers over and over again late in his career, often experimenting with unusual compositions.
Curator Megan Fontanella:
Megan Fontanella: I love the way that he presents these four dancers backstage, preparing for a performance, and you see them kind of leaning forward, eager to enter the stage¬. And the dancer at the far right, in fact, her head is entirely cropped out of the composition. And it’s here that we see Degas’s interest in photography—that sense of a snapshot, of a moment in time. The dancers are not depicted prettily on a stage. Instead, they are at rest. They’re rehearsing. They’re contorting their bodies. They’re awkward. They’re caught unaware. So that the viewer is capturing them at this almost-private moment, as they’re preparing for the stage.
Edgar Degas, "Dancers in Green and Yellow" ("Danseuses vertes et jaunes"), ca. 1903. Pastel and charcoal on three pieces of tracing paper, mounted to paperboard, 38 7/8 x 28 1/8 inches (98.8 x 71.5 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Thannhauser Collection, Gift, Justin K. Thannhauser 78.2514.12
