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Landscape Design LORD OF THE DANCE
Landscape Design LORD OF THE DANCE
LORD OF THE DANCECelina Fox marvels at artist Edgar Degass pioneering depictions of performing ballet dancers and, overleaf, reviews other current exhibitions.In an age when a superabundance of human flesh is routinely on parade along every high street, it is difficult toappreciate the stir caused in the Victorian manly chest by the glimpse of a stocking - clad female ankle. Constricted by thecorset, respectable women conformed to rigid codes of deportment and behaviour that severely curtailed their capacity to step out and engage with the world. For nineteenth - century artists, life classes offered limited freedom of access to nude models in classical poses. But when Edgar Degas wanted to discover how a womans body really worked, he turned to girls in the laundry and, above all, the ballet. The French romantic ballet was a world of illusion, with sugary promotional prints immortalising its stars in ethereal mid - pirouette. Italian ballo grande presented spectacles for the urban bourgeoisie, featuring scores of pretty young things in the corps de ballet, ripe for post - performance plucking. As a man who enjoyed the leisure activities of his class, Degas held a season ticket to the Opera de Paris, and when he was 38, in the summer of1872, he obtained permission to observe the ballet masters Louis Merante and Jules Perrot conduct classes in the practice rooms. His first ballet paintings depict the dancers in a subdued light, poised to begin their steps or resting on the barre. The effect is objective, cool and static. But by the mid 1870s, the ballet had grown into his obsession, the focus of an endless search for the means to convey movement, and the physical strains and stresses involved. Charles Garniers huge new opera house, opened in January 1875, became a second home - its dancers, alter egos for the labours of the artist himself. Degass ballet pictures are so familiar that we forget their originality and the hard grind involved in achieving their apparently effortless effects, a process illuminated by the Royal Academys latest exhibition. The artist made charcoal studies of the dancers in productions, in class and in his studio, which served as a reference collection of exercise positions and movements on stage. These were incorporated into compositions made in pastel on paper, or oil on canvas, which track successive stages on the path from classroom to performance. Humdrum figures waiting around, adjusting sashes and shoes, yawning and scratching, emerge from the wings metamorphosed into exotically coloured moths, whirling and flickering in the footlights. The curators of the Royal Academys exhibition consider Degass preoccupations in the context of advances in contemporary photography, of which the artist was keenly aware. Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne - Jules Marey pioneered the use of high - speed photography to record moving subjects in sequences of frozen action. The fashion for panoramic photography may also have influenced his wide - angle views of the dancers exercise rooms. Perhaps there was something of documentary photography in the unsentimental directness of his gaze. But with its incessant movement, kaleidoscopic colour and dramatic lighting effects, the live ballet performance was beyond the reach of the camera technology of the day, leaving Degas alone to capture fleeting moments of human energy - evanescent form caught in art. Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement is at the Royal Academy of Arts, from September 17 to December 11, sponsored by BNY Mellon IMPERIAL MINT Of all the great collections of man - made and natural curiosities assembled at princely courts for the purposes of delectation, edification and prestige, that of the Habsburgs was the greatest. The size and the power of the Holy Roman Empire ensured that its rulers, based in Vienna or Prague, could acquire precious metals and minerals on an unprecedented scale and have them fashioned into exquisite works of art. The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge has been lent a choice selection of highlights from this Kunstkam - mer, while a new installation is being prepared for it in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Focusing on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they include examples that dem - onstrate the extent of imperial reach, with cups made of rhinoceros horn and nautilus shell, a gold - filigree cask - et from Goa and a Chinese jade bowl. Splendour & Power: Imperial Treasures from Viennais at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Trumpington Street, Cambridge until January 8,2012; admission, free Portrait medallion of Emperor Charles V, northern Italy, c. 1535-1540. Ivory capsule, c.1600 |
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