To mark the seventieth birthday of Sadlers Wells, London’s principal dance theatre, this week’s tangentially relevant picture is Edgar Degas’s radiant but disconcerting pastel, A Curtsying Dancer with a Bouquet.
The performance is over and its star, putting her best foot forward, revels in the applause. Her heavily made-up cheeks have been bleached almost white by the glare of the stage lights, while her expression has been made to look all the more strange, even sinister, by the raking shadow cast across her forehead and her eyes. She seems to grimace as much as to smile. Seconds ago she must have been a vision of beauty, grace and elegance; but now there is something grotesque about her. Degas freezes the moment and savours its spectral weirdness, his point perhaps being that the dream of art must always end, and that when it does, reality – “terrible, trivial reality”, in Charles Baudelaire’s words – will always reassert itself. The painter’s act of defiance has been to make his own illusion out of that very moment of disillusionment.
No artist was more strongly drawn to the ballet than Degas. During the course of his life he created approximately one and a half thousand drawings, paintings, pastels and sculptures about dance and dancers. The journalist Francois Thiebault-Sisson published an account of coming across the artist one day at the Paris Opera, where he would observe ballet classes and attend numerous rehearsals and performances:
“The rehearsal was in full sway: entrechats and pirouettes followed one after the other with rigorous regularity, in a laborious tension of all these young and supple bodies, and the spectacle was so curious to a young novice like myself that I was utterly absorbed in silent contemplation from which I would not have emerged for...
