Degas: More Than Just a Ballet Master
In the fantastic “Dance Lesson” on loan from the National Gallery in Washington, the composition comes even closer to a photographer’s way of organizing space. Wide areas unencumbered by detail on the wall and floor, contrast with the figures concentrated along a diagonal axis rising from the lower corner left up to the top corner right. Nothing like it had been seen before Degas. The painter’s stroke of genius was to tone the areas devoid of detail in shimmering hues. At both extremities of the axis, the figures are again cropped at the edges as in photography. The photographer’s approach to space organization and the artist’s own interpretation of it could be bolder. No painter preceding Degas had ever dared to compose anything approaching “Dancers in the Green Room,” one of the glories of the Detroit Institute of Arts. An enormous cello on which a ballerina rests her leg while bending to adjust her shoe almost fills one half of the composition while the other half is occupied by a cluster of young women. The way in which the main female character rises in the foreground, leaving the smaller figures massed high up, is again a photographer’s idea.
(Source: The New York Times)
