Opera and ballet companies, museums, and comedians have been finding innovative ways to share performances in this time of lockdown. There were no such alternatives in the 19th century; even photography was a nascent technology. Instead it was artists and writers who preserved gossamer fragments of live performances. Few did so with such immediacy as Edgar Degas, whose work was to be celebrated at the National Gallery of Art this spring in the exhibition “Degas at the Opéra,” (timed to the 350th anniversary of the Paris Opéra’s founding). This should have been a blockbuster show, but its run was cut short due to the pandemic. The museum has created a treasure trove of content that can be accessed online.
Degas is a supremely fashion-friendly artist. Dancers were his favorite subject and he rendered their voluminous layers of tulle and their bow-tied sashes in a soft, dreamy palette that speaks to fashion romantics. The appeal—and importance—of Degas’s work extends beyond these aspects, however. There’s his explorations of various media, for one; yet what’s transmitted in painting, pastel, wax, or print is the artist’s all-encompassing passion for his subject. As designer Iris van Herpen, a former dancer, notes, Degas’s “are really intimate works. There’s a fragility and a strength at the same time—and I just love the romance as well. In dance there is such devotion; being a dancer really creates a devotion in life that goes beyond a profession. It’s like sacrificing your body to a higher cause, and I think that’s what’s being captured really beautifully in the paintings [of Degas], that devotion to the arts and the people in them.”
In some of his work, Degas provides a sort of all-access pass to the behind-the-scenes world of the ballet, but he’s doing more than chronicling what he sees. As Kaywin Feldman, the National Gallery of Art’s director, notes in an audio tour, Degas’s opera “existed primarily in his mind.” His art is a combination of observation and interpretation, fact and fiction, and that’s what makes it sing. Encore!
