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The Impressionist painters were truly figures of their own time, habitually going to the theatre, to the café-concerts, the opera and occasionally the circus, as well as striking up friendships and relationships with actors, actresses, ballerinas and singers. Degas frequently went to Charles Garnier's recently opened Opéra, a building which symbolised the new Paris after Haussmann's redesign of the city. From 1874 onwards, Degas was to devote much of his subject-matter to depictions of the ballet, and one only needs to glance at Paul-André Lemoisne's catalogue raisonné to appreciate the importance of this subject in his work.
Degas saw in the ballet a perfect vehicle for the study of the human figure in movement, and made numerous and repeated studies of the different poses of the dancers. He painted them in a wide variety of poses, rehearsing or on stage, getting dressed or tying their dancing shoes, always emphasizing the enormous physical demands of dancing and the concentration of the dancers. Ronald Pickvance (1993) published an interesting account by Louisine Havemeyer, an American friend of Mary Cassat and an enthusiastic collector of Degas, who recounted that when she asked Degas why he painted so many ballerinas, he replied, "Because, Madam, only in them can I rediscover the movement of the Greeks."
In The Dancer in Green in Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Degas depicts a dancer performing in front of a public which cannot be seen but which shares the same position as the viewer. Our gaze falls on the stage as if we were seeing it through opera glasses from one of those side boxes which allows those inside to get a glimpse backstage. The use of a high and diagonal viewpoint was a device which Degas used to capture his models in unexpected poses.
Among the group in the foreground, only one of the dancers is seen full-length, captured at the moment in which she raises her arms and left leg and performs a complicated and swift turn. The other figures are only partially seen and the viewer can only make out part of a leg or tutu, by which means the artist leaves the spectator to imagine the rest of the body and its movement. This way of cutting the figures, which Degas used in all his ballet compositions, is derived both from Japanese prints and from the new invention of photography. Photography led him to invent a pictorial space in which the main scene no longer takes place in the centre of the composition, as was traditional in western art, perhaps in order to show that reality is always transitory, changing and incomplete, and must be represented in a fragmented manner.
In the background are various ballerinas arranged frontally and dressed in orange, casually awaiting their turn, or having just finished dancing. The scenery is reduced to a blurred image of what seems to be a rocky landscape with trees and is of little importance within the composition. In addition, the bold foreshortenings and rapid gestures of the young women create a sense of rapid movement which heightens the spontaneity of the scene. The fleeting nature of the action is captured through the rapid strokes which could be achieved with pastel, used by Degas with unprecedented virtuosity. Pastel, a medium which became fashionable in Europe in the eighteenth-century for portraits of the upper middle classes, was given equal importance by the Impressionists as oil painting, but it was Degas who stood out as the true master of the technique.
Paloma Alarcó
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