Ballet and Dance
Degas spent thirty years painting dancers in the wings of the Paris Opera. Matisse painted dancers in a circle. Two very different visions of the same subject.
Ballet and Dance: The Body in Motion
Dance is one of the oldest subjects in art. Cave paintings show figures in motion. Greek vases show dancers. Renaissance frescoes show angels and muses dancing. But dance as a subject for serious painting, not decoration, is a nineteenth-century development. It starts with Degas.
Edgar Degas and the Paris Opera
Degas painted dancers for thirty years. He produced over 1,500 works on the subject: paintings, pastels, drawings, prints, and sculptures. He painted ballet classes, rehearsals, performances, and the moments behind the scenes that no audience sees. He painted dancers adjusting ribbons, scratching their backs, yawning during rehearsals, and collapsing with exhaustion after performances. His "The Dance Class," available in our store, shows a rehearsal room at the Paris Opera with the ballet master Jules Perrot watching a dancer perform. The other dancers are not watching. Some are stretching. Some are talking. One is adjusting her earring. This is what Degas did differently. He did not paint the performance. He painted the boredom, the waiting, and the ordinary moments that make up most of a dancer's life. Degas had a season ticket to the Paris Opera that gave him access to the rehearsal rooms and the wings of the stage. He could walk backstage, sit in the dance studios, and watch the dancers from angles that the audience never saw. He used this access to paint views that feel like glimpses caught through a doorway: dancers seen from above, from the side, from behind. The compositions are often asymmetrical, with figures cut off by the edge of the canvas, as if Degas had stumbled on the scene and painted it before anyone noticed. His pastel "The Star," also in our store, shows a dancer performing alone on stage, with a dark figure in the wings behind her. The pastel technique allowed Degas to work quickly and capture the movement of the dancer's skirt with a fluency that oil paint could not match. The painting is about a moment: a dancer on stage, the light hitting her, the audience invisible beyond the frame. But the dark figure in the wings reminds you that this moment is manufactured. Someone is waiting to help her off. The performance is work. Degas's dancers are not idealized. He painted their exhaustion, their boredom, and their physical strain. He painted feet blistered by pointe shoes. He painted dancers slumping between exercises. He was not painting the beauty of ballet. He was painting the labor that produces the beauty.
Henri Matisse and the Joy of Dance
Matisse painted dance for completely different reasons. His "Dance" from 1910, available in our store, shows five red figures dancing in a circle on a green hill against a blue sky. The figures are crude. They have no faces. Their bodies are simplified to outlines filled with flat red paint. The painting is not about observation. It is about rhythm, movement, and the feeling of bodies in motion. Matisse was a Fauve. The Fauves, or "wild beasts," were a group of painters who used color not to describe reality but to express emotion. They painted with colors that had no relationship to the natural world: red figures, green faces, blue trees. The movement lasted only a few years, from 1905 to 1908, but it opened the door to expressionist painting in the twentieth century. "Dance" was commissioned by the Russian collector Sergei Shchukin for the staircase of his mansion in Moscow. Matisse painted it as a companion to "Music," which shows five figures sitting and playing instruments. The two paintings together represent the two fundamental human activities: movement and sound. "Dance" is the more powerful of the two. The circle of figures, holding hands, leaning backward as they spin, captures something primal about dance that no observational painting could achieve.
Two Approaches
Degas and Matisse represent two opposite approaches to the same subject. Degas observed. He went to the rehearsal room, watched the dancers, and painted what he saw. His work is specific, detailed, and rooted in a particular place: the Paris Opera in the 1870s and 1880s. Matisse imagined. He did not observe dancers and paint them. He invented a vision of dance that exists outside any specific time or place. His figures could be dancing in 1910 or 10,000 BC. Both approaches are valid. Both produced extraordinary paintings. The difference between them is the difference between observation and invention, between the specific and the universal, between painting what you see and painting what you feel. This is one of the fundamental tensions in art, and dance is the subject where it is most visible.
Why Dance Matters as a Subject
Dance is the one subject that painting cannot literally depict. Painting is static. Dance is motion. Every painting of a dancer is an attempt to solve the same problem: how to put movement onto a surface that does not move. Degas solved this problem by painting the moments around the movement: the rehearsal, the rest, the preparation. He painted the context of dance rather than the dance itself, because the context is static and the dance is not. Matisse solved it by simplifying the figure to a shape that implies motion through its posture. A red outline leaning backward suggests movement more effectively than a detailed body frozen in position. Every painter who has tried to paint dance has faced this problem, and every solution is different. This is why dance, as a subject, has produced some of the most inventive paintings in Western art. The subject forces the painter to innovate.
Where to See Paintings of Dance
The Musee d'Orsay in Paris has the largest collection of Degas's ballet paintings, including "The Dance Class" and "The Star." The Metropolitan Museum of Art has several Degas dancers, including pastels and sculptures. The National Gallery in London holds "The Ballet Class" and other Degas works. The Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg has Matisse's "Dance" and "Music," the original Shchukin commission. The Museum of Modern Art in New York has a later version of Matisse's "Dance."
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