1895
unspecified
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Frieze of Dancers is a 1895 unspecified by Edgar Degas, a Impressionism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see one dancer drawn four times in a row, like frames from a flip-book. She twists, bends, and balances on one leg against a blurry background of pink and gray. Degas painted this on a huge canvas—six feet wide—yet he let the paint drip and smeared it with his thumb. Most artists kept that kind of mess for small sketches. He also jammed four moments into one picture, something few had tried before. Look up how Degas used pastels next; the way he layered them changed how artists thought about color.
This painting may depict a single dancer seen from four different viewpoints. The young woman is placed in an undefined setting, surrounded by mere wisps of color, applied so spontaneously that the paint ran and dripped. Degas even added the circles in the foreground with his thumb. Such audacity, while acceptable in a small sketch, must have shocked the artist's contemporaries when presented on a six-foot canvas. Equally radical is the idea of combining multiple views of a single figure. Degas's unusual presentation may have been inspired by the photographs of Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904)
The ballet is a subject Degas returned to again and again over the course of his career. Rather than public performances, he often depicted dancers behind the curtain, practicing, waiting, or, as in this painting, lacing up their shoes.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Born Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas on 19 July 1834 in Paris, Edgar Degas came from an affluent banking family with aristocratic roots and spent his childhood among the cultivated circles of the French capital.
See the richer artist page
