EDGAR DEGAS (1834-1917)

Although many Impressionists took to depicting entertainment scenes in cafés, theaters and the opera as the heart of modern life, few did so as fervently as Degas. As early as the 1860s, the artist began favoring two forms of spectacle which he would revisit tirelessly throughout his career: horseraces and, most famously, the ballet. These otherwise disparate activities equally allowed him to pursue his fascination with depicting human anatomy in movement. The stylized choreography of ballet especially provided a variety of forms with which he could push the technical boundaries between traditional artistic mediums. Indeed, picturing dancers was especially important for Degas’ development as a draughtsman; as Richard Kendall writes: "Degas increasingly used the subject of the ballet to break new compositional ground or cross pictorial frontiers, such as those between pastel and printmaking or between the depiction of public spectacle and private behavior" (Degas and the Little Dancer, exh. cat., Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, 1998, p. 3).
The present counterproof is a fine example of Degas’ technical ingenuity at work. To produce it, he first transferred the original pastel to another sheet by passing it through a printing press face down on a blank piece of paper. The resulting impression was heightened with pastel, and possibly run through the press again. The reproducible nature of printmaking allowed the artist to revisit the same subject while experimenting with color variations from his unique pastel palette. Here, the dancer’s inadvertent grace, as she adjusts her costume, is highlighted by the harmoniously balanced use of complementary blues, yellow and orange. Degas succeeded in making an informal gesture such as the one performed here as elegant as if it were a port-de-bras.