Dancer at the photographer

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Dancer with the photographer
Edgar Degas , 1875
65 × 50 cm
oil on canvas
State Museum of Fine Arts AS Pushkin , Moscow

Dancer at the Photographer ( French La danseuse chez le photographe ) is the title of a painting by Edgar Degas . It is painted in oil on canvas and has a height of 65 cm and a width of 50 cm. The picture from 1875 shows a young dancer in ballet costume posing in front of a mirror. In the background you can see house walls and snow-covered roofs in Paris through a window front . The painting belongs to the collection of the State Museum of Fine Arts AS Pushkin in Moscow .

Image description

In the painting Dancer at the Photographer's, Edgar Degas shows a young ballet dancer in a sparsely furnished room. What is striking is the young woman's unnatural posture, which does not seem unusual for a dancer of classical ballet. The right leg is her standing leg, while she has raised the left leg slightly to put the tip of the left foot - en pointe - on the floor. The two hands are - very close - raised above the head in a circle, without the hands touching each other. She turned her head slightly to her left shoulder and stretched her chin up. She wears a white ballet costume with a tutu , on which a few spots of color on her left side suggest a reddish decor made of silk flowers . Individual, rather brownish spots on the edge of the cleavage and other parts of the dress can also represent decorations. The dancer's legs are wrapped in white stockings, her feet are in pointe shoes . She has tied a black ribbon around her neck and there are gold bracelets on her wrists . She also wears a piece of jewelry on her earlobe - possibly a pearl. In the brown pinned up hair there is another decorative object on the side, which could be artificial flowers, but other materials are also conceivable here. Her face is strikingly dark in contrast to the light clothing. Her complexion may have got a strong color from the strenuous posture. While the lips are only indicated in a pale pink, the visible right eye of the dancer appears as a dark, almost black spot that can be read as a sign of fatigue. The strained facial expression of the dancer made the Russian art critic Jakob Tugendhold draw a comparison with characters from fiction by Émile Zola or the Goncourt brothers . He described the dancer in 1914 as a "bête humaine", referring to Zola's novel The Beast in Man .

The dancer stands, moved from the center of the picture to the left, on a beige-gray plank floor that occupies the lower half of the painting. On the right there is a mirror cut off from the edge of the picture, of which only a foot and the wooden frame on the side can be seen. Behind the dancer there is a large window front with narrow glass panes extending from the top of the picture almost to the floor. Only the window frame, a narrow wall strip and a skirting board separate glass panes from the wooden floor. A white and a blue curtain are drawn to the right in front of this glass front. A diffuse light falls through the glass panes into the room. Only the blue curtain on the right shines partially in a brighter light. When looking outside, the view from an elevated point of view is facing facades of residential buildings with a few rows of windows. Above that there is a snow-covered roof landscape made up of roofs and chimneys next to and behind each other, over which a blue-gray sky is painted with a few brushstrokes. Overall, the painting is rather sketchy, whereby Degas has succeeded in working out different materials. The standing mirror on the right edge of the picture can be seen as heavy wooden furniture, while the dancer's skirt appears light and almost transparent. The picture is signed, but not dated, “Degas” lower right. For the art historian Marina Bessonowa , the painting is “perhaps one of the most expressive amalgamations of nature and interior in French painting” and “is undoubtedly one of Degas' masterpieces”.

A posing dancer

Edgar Degas: Sketch of a Dancer with Arms Raised , 1874
Edgar Degas: Three dancers in a practice room , 1873

Ballet dancers have been a common motif in Edgar Degas' work since the late 1860s. With the permission of the Paris Opera , he was allowed to make sketches of the dancers in the rehearsal rooms there and on the stage. His representations are not portraits of the individual dancers, but depictions of their typical poses, without placing particular emphasis on the individual facial features. The name of only a few models in Degas' pictures has been passed down, and the identity of those portrayed in the painting Dancer by the photographer is also unknown.

The charcoal sketch of a dancer with raised arms from 1874 could be a preliminary work for this painting. Here the dancer assumes the same posture as the sitter in the painting Dancer with the photographer . In other works by Degas, dancers can also be found in the same pose. For example, in the painting Three Dancers in a Practice Room (private collection) from 1873, on the left edge of the picture, there is a dancer with arms raised above her head, as shown in the picture Dancer at the photographer . Degas also depicted the group of three dancers in a similar way in front of a large window with a view of the houses opposite. These matches could be an indication that the title dancer for the photographer does not indicate a real situation for a photographer. The pose of the dancer in front of the mirror could just as easily be played out in the rehearsal room of the opera or in a painting studio.

For the painting Dancer at the Photographer , there were various names in the first few years after the picture was created. Art historians such as Ronald Pickvance and Jean Sutherland Boggs assume that the painting Dancer was first shown publicly to the photographer in 1875 in the London exhibition Tenth Exhibition of the Society of French Artists and was named Ballet Dancer Practising there (analogously: ballet dancer at rehearsal ) wore. On this occasion, a London critic commented positively on the picture: “really a chef d'œuvre in its way” (meaning: a real masterpiece in its own way ). In Paris, Degas only presented the picture to the public in 1879. In the fourth group exhibition of the Impressionists in rooms at 28 avenue de l'Opéra, it was titled Danseuse posant chez le photographe ( dancer, posing for the photographer ). In 1899 the painting was in the Durand-Ruel gallery , which put a sign on the stretcher of the picture on which the title Dancer at the photographer 's, which is still common today, can be found. The “photographer” in the title of the painting goes back to Edgar Degas himself. In the picture, however, nothing suggests a photographer. The person of a photographer is missing as well as any props that could indicate a photographer. There is no camera, no tripod, no photo plates and no background scenery as they were often found in a photographer's studio in the 19th century. Only the large window in the background is possibly a reference to a photographer's studio, but it could also belong to a painter's studio or a rehearsal room of the ballet. It remains to be seen whether the picture actually depicts a scene in a photographer's studio or whether Degas chose the title for other reasons.

Edgar Degas had a special relationship with photography. He had already visited a photo exhibition in 1855 and was always interested in technical innovations in this field. However, he did not begin to take photographs with his own camera until 1895. The influence of photography can be seen repeatedly in his works, this is particularly evident in the later paintings with motifs from the racetrack and in his sculptures of horses, in which he was based on photo series by Eadweard Muybridge . Degas's circle of friends also included the photographer Nadar , in whose rooms the first group exhibition of the French Impressionists took place in 1874, in which Degas also took part.

Provenance

The painting Dancer at the Photographer was exhibited at Charles Deschamps, Degas' London dealer, from the spring of 1875. In 1879 it was in the possession of the Parisian art dealer Hector Brame and then entered the collection of Armand Doria . At the auction of the Doria collection on May 4 and 5, 1899 in the Georges Petit Gallery , the picture changed hands for 22,000 francs . It initially belonged to the inventory of the Parisian art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel , was offered by the art dealer of Bruno and Paul Cassirer in Berlin from September 8 of the same year and was shown again at Durand-Ruel in Paris from December 1899. Durand-Ruel sold the painting to the Russian art collector Sergei Ivanovich Shchukin in 1902 for 35,000 francs . From 1909 he showed the work together with his extensive art collection in his Moscow palace to the public. In the aftermath of the October Revolution , Shchukin left Russia, his collection was nationalized and his palace was declared the First Museum of New Western Painting in 1918 . In 1923 the Shchukin collection was merged with the art collection of Iwan Abramowitsch Morosow . Both collections were then presented together in Morosow's Palace as the State Museum for New Western Painting . In 1948 the Shchukin and Morozov collections were divided between Moscow and Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) and Degas' painting Dancer at the Photographer ended up in the collection of the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.

literature

  • Anne Baldassari (ed.): Icônes de l'art modern, la collection Chtchoukine . Fondation Louis Vuitton, Gallimard, Paris 2016, ISBN 978-2-07-269273-4 .
  • Felix Baumann (ed.), Jean Sutherland Boggs: Degas, the portraits . Exhibition catalog Zurich and Tübingen, Merrell Holberton, London 1994, ISBN 1-85894-017-6 .
  • Jean Sutherland Boggs: Degas . Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 1988, ISBN 0-87099-519-7 .
  • Georg-W. Költzsch: Morosow – Schchukin, the collectors . Museum Folkwang, DuMont, Cologne 1993, ISBN 3-7701-3144-4 .
  • Paul-André Lemoisne : Degas et son oeuvre . P. Brame et CM de Hauke, Paris 1946–1949.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The German title is taken from the exhibition catalog Georg-W. Költzsch: Morosow – Schtschukin, the collectors , p. 389.
  2. ^ French title based on Paul-Andé Lemoisne: Degas et son oeuvre , Vol. II, p. 246, no. 447.
  3. ↑ Jean Sutherland Boggs dates the picture to 1875, Ronald Pickvance gives a deviating 1874. See Jean Sutherland Boggs: Degas , p. 244. The painting was also dated to 1875 at the exhibition in the Shchukin Collection 2016–2017 in Paris. See Anne Baldassari: Icônes de l'art moderne, la collection Chtchoukine , p. 439.
  4. ↑ Jakob Togendhold: La Collection française de S. Chtchoukine in Apollon 1914, quoted from Anne Baldassari: Icônes de l'art modern, la collection Chtchoukine , p. 236.
  5. ↑ a b c d e Georg-W. Költzsch: Morosow – Schtschukin, the collectors , p. 389.
  6. ^ Paul-Andé Lemoisne: Degas et son oeuvre , Vol. II, p. 246, no. 447.
  7. ^ A b Jean Sutherland Boggs: Degas , 244
  8. ↑ Since there are no images of the exhibition in London in 1875, the two art historians refer to a letter from Degas to his London art dealer Charles W. Deschamps, dated May 15, 1876 by the art historian Theodore Reff. It mentions that the color of the picture was not yet completely dry. See Jean Sutherland Boggs: Degas , 244.
  9. ^ Jean Sutherland Boggs: Degas , 245.
  10. ^ French and German title from Georg-W. Költzsch: Morosow – Schtschukin, the collectors , p. 389.
  11. ^ Felix Baumann (ed.), Jean Sutherland Boggs: Degas, die Portraits , p. 305.
  12. ↑ See Degas and Muybridge in Jean Sutherland Boggs: Degas , 459.