Step into the world of Edgar Degas, and you inevitably encounter the swirling tutus and poised limbs of ballet dancers. While known as an Impressionist, Degas often bristled at the label, preferring to call himself a Realist. His fascination wasn’t just with the polished performance on stage, but the gritty, exhausting reality backstage and in the rehearsal room. And as his career progressed, particularly when his eyesight began to fail, he turned increasingly to the vibrant, tactile medium of pastel to capture these fleeting moments of intense physical exertion and fragile grace.
Why dancers? For Degas, the ballet offered a universe of forms in motion. It was a ready-made laboratory for studying the human body under stress, contorted into unnatural poses, balanced precariously, or caught mid-leap. He wasn’t interested in romanticizing the dancers’ lives; instead, he observed them with an almost clinical detachment, noting the awkward stretches, the yawns of boredom, the slumped shoulders after a grueling practice. This behind-the-scenes perspective provided dynamic compositions and a sense of immediacy that the formal stage performance often lacked. The artificial lighting of the theatre and rehearsal rooms also fascinated him, allowing him to experiment with dramatic contrasts and unusual color palettes.
Pastel: The Perfect Medium for Movement
Oil paint, the dominant medium of the era, demands patience. It requires drying time between layers and often involves careful blending to achieve smooth transitions. Pastel, essentially pure pigment held together with a binder and formed into sticks, offered Degas something entirely different: speed and spontaneity. He could lay down colour directly, layer hues rapidly, and blend them with his fingers, a rag, or a stump (a tool called a tortillon), or leave the strokes distinct and visible. This immediacy was crucial for capturing the ephemeral nature of dance – a gesture held for a second, the blur of a rapid turn.
Pastel allowed Degas to essentially ‘draw’ with colour. The linear quality of the pastel stick remained evident in his work. Bold outlines could define a form, while frantic scribbles of colour could suggest the rustle of a skirt or the vibration of movement. Unlike oil, where colours are often mixed on the palette, Degas achieved his rich, complex hues by layering different pastel strokes directly on the paper. A dancer’s skin might be built up from strokes of pink, ochre, blue, and green, creating a shimmering, vibrant effect that conveyed both form and the play of light.
Degas treated pastel with the seriousness often reserved for oil painting. He experimented constantly, sometimes wetting the pastels to create a paste, or using fixative between layers to prevent smudging and allow for further application. His layering could become incredibly dense, resulting in a richly textured surface that belied the medium’s reputation for delicacy. This innovative approach significantly expanded the expressive potential of pastel.
Techniques for Capturing Dynamism
Degas developed a unique pastel technique perfectly suited to his subject matter. His approach wasn’t about photographic accuracy in the conventional sense; it was about conveying the sensation of movement and the atmosphere of the dancers’ world.
Layering and Texture
As mentioned, layering was fundamental. Degas would build up colours intensely. He might start with a darker tone or a complementary colour, then layer lighter or contrasting hues on top. These underlying layers often peek through, creating optical vibrancy and a sense of depth. The physical texture of the built-up pastel dust itself adds to the tactile quality of the images. You can almost feel the powdery surface, echoing the chalky dust dancers used on their shoes.
The Power of Line
Degas never abandoned line. Even in his most richly coloured pastels, strong contours often define figures or parts of figures. These lines aren’t always smooth or continuous; they can be broken, sketchy, and energetic, reinforcing the sense of motion. He might heavily outline a dancer’s leg to emphasize its tension, while letting the tutu dissolve into a flurry of softer strokes. This combination of sharp definition and blurred suggestion is key to the dynamism of his work.
Composition and Cropping
His compositional choices were revolutionary and borrowed heavily from photography and Japanese prints. Degas often used:
- Unusual viewpoints: Looking down from a high angle, or up from below, creating diagonals and foreshortening that energize the scene.
- Asymmetrical arrangements: Figures might be clustered to one side, leaving large areas seemingly ’empty’ but compositionally active.
- Radical cropping: Figures are frequently cut off by the edge of the frame, as if captured in a candid snapshot. This implies that the scene continues beyond the picture plane, enhancing the sense of a fleeting moment observed.
Visible Process, Visible Energy
One of the most striking aspects of Degas’ pastels is that you can often see how they were made. The individual strokes of the pastel stick remain visible, creating a network of lines and colours across the surface. This isn’t the polished, invisible technique favoured by academic painters. Instead, the energy of Degas’ own gestures – the quick zig-zags suggesting fabric, the bold strokes defining a limb – is transferred directly to the image. The viewer senses the speed and intensity of the artist’s hand responding to the dancers’ movements.
He frequently worked on tracing paper, allowing him to replicate poses and experiment with different arrangements and colour schemes. He might trace a figure, flip the paper, and rework it, leading to series of works exploring variations on a theme. This process-oriented approach further emphasizes his focus on analysis and repetition, much like the dancers he depicted endlessly practicing their steps.
Later Works: Colour Unleashed
As Degas aged and his eyesight deteriorated, his pastel technique became even bolder. Forms simplified, and colour became more intense and less descriptive, bordering on the abstract. The layers grew thicker, the strokes broader and more vigorous. These late pastels possess an extraordinary raw energy, where colour and line fuse to express the sheer physical power and emotional intensity of the dance in its most elemental form. The details might fade, but the essence of movement, conveyed through vibrant, clashing hues and powerful marks, becomes paramount.
An Enduring Fascination
Degas’ pastel dancers remain among the most beloved works of the Impressionist era, though he himself was a complex figure who stood somewhat apart from the core group. His relentless observation, innovative techniques, and focus on movement over mere prettiness created a body of work that feels astonishingly modern. He didn’t just paint dancers; he used pastel to dissect their movements, explore the effects of light, and convey the atmosphere of their demanding world. The chalky dust of his layered pastels seems to hold the very energy of the dance, forever captured in strokes of brilliant colour and dynamic line.
