Degas’s Dancers at the Barre: Point and Counterpoint

Degas’s Dancers at the Barre: Point and Counterpoint
(October 1, 2011–January 8, 2012)

Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas (1834–1917) was a passionate devotee of ballet—he knew the dancers, the music, the choreography. He also knew the work involved in the life of the dancer, the endless repetition of steps to achieve grace, agility, and expression. He pursued the subject for over 40 years through oils, pastels, drawings, prints, and sculpture, creating over 1,500 works devoted to the anatomy, posture, and movement of dancers. Degas’s Dancers at the Barre: Point and Counterpoint is the first exhibition of Degas’s dancers in Washington, D.C., in 25 years.

The impressionist master’s relentless experiments with movement and dance culminated in Dancers at the Barre (early 1880s–c. 1900), one of the greatest works in The Phillips Collection. The exhibition brings together about 30 related paintings, works on paper, and bronzes, created between 1870 and 1900, from some of the world’s greatest collections, including the NY Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen; Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo; the British Museum, London; the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; and the Corcoran Gallery of Art and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, D.C. The exhibition also features work by Degas in the Phillips’s permanent collection.

Early in 2007, Head of Conservation Elizabeth Steele set out to rescue Dancers at the Barre. The painting’s aging varnish, flaking paint, and years of airborne grime endangered its structural stability and diminished its aesthetic appearance. Steele restored a lustrous palette of bright blue, white, and black against a flaming orange background, and located an inscription on the canvas indicating it was begun around 1884. She also uncovered evidence that Degas cut the canvas down after the painting was underway, repositioned the dancers’ arms and legs at several times, and daubed paint on a dancer’s neck with his thumb. These discoveries indicate that he began the painting before 1884 but returned to it several times over the next two decades, intensifying its color palette and repositioning and blurring the contours of the figures.

Degas’s process mirrored the rote and repetition, point and counterpoint of ballet—he repeated himself obsessively, tracing and refining compositions over decades, and reproducing the same subjects from multiple perspectives in a range of media. He often produced studies for individual dancers or small groups then combined their figures in new compositions. Occasionally, he stripped away costume to deepen his understanding of anatomy and posture. Dancers at the Barre is reunited with full-scale pastel and charcoal sketches of its dancers shown individually and together, nude and clothed, for the first time since they were in the artist’s possession.

For museum founder Duncan Phillips, Dancers at the Barre was “a masterpiece . . . in its daring record of instantaneous change at a split second of observation,” in which Degas “miraculously transformed the incident of swiftly seen shapes in time into a thrilling vision of dynamic forms in space.”

The exhibition is organized by The Phillips Collection.

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