Hello, everyone.
Today I would like to talk to you about "The Dancer on the Stage", written by the representative french Impressionist painter Edgar Degas, which was created in 1877 and is a pastel painting now in the collection of the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.
A brief introduction to Impressionism, everyone should be familiar with it, Monet is one of the representative painters of Impressionism.
Impressionist painting features include:
Grasp the impression of the moment to paint with extensive brushstrokes, often go outdoors to sketch, pay attention to light and color and their changes, and depict natural landscapes.
Of course, there are also those who mainly depict characters, such as Degas.
Degas is very fond of sketching, preferring slim, smooth, coherent lines.
His sketcher was the academic master Ingres, who was also the most exquisite of Ingres's apprentices.
However, Degas is better known as a professional painter of "ballerinas", and although he is generally considered an "impressionist" painter, some of his works are more classical and romantic.
The painting we're going to talk about today is one of his many ballerina-themed paintings, The Dancer on the Stage.
The original French title of the painting was "L'étoile ou danseuse sur scene", "étoile" means "star", which here means "principal ballet dancer".
We can see the star ballerina in the picture spinning in the center of the stage, jumping on one foot;
Fair skin, crimson cheeks, wearing a flower crown on the head, and a black velvet ribbon fluttering around the neck like a swan;
The white and fluffy ballet dress is embellished with bright red flowers, and she is slender and feminine like a beautiful white swan in the dreamy light.
The painting captures the impression of a moment on stage, while the compositional layout is also subtle.
Have you ever wondered where the angle of view of the entire painting is?
There seems to be other ballerinas in the upper left of the picture, are they waiting?
Who is the mysterious man who is mostly half a shadow?
Is the stage director and producer? Is the manager of the theater? Is it a ballet instructor? Is it a newspaper reporter? Are crazy fans?
Still is......?
First of all, with regard to "ballet", what we need to understand is that this artistic activity, which we undoubtedly consider today to be elegant, was not considered so in the social context of the time, or even the opposite.
Ballet originated in Renaissance Italy and later spread to the French court and was greatly developed by the sun king Louis XIV;
However, it was not until the second half of the 17th century that female dancers took the stage of the theater;
In the first half of the 18th century, in order to facilitate dancers to dance and make movements more flexibly, the length of the skirt was changed to above the knee;
You should know that at that time, it was all three layers inside and three layers outside, and long skirts and trousers, people thought it was very indecent.
It was not until the 19th century that some of the postures, movements, and forms of classical ballet that we are now familiar with were established, and ballet also ushered in its heyday;
Unfortunately, soon the French ballet industry began to decline, the center of gravity began to shift to Germany, and Degas began to depict ballerinas, which was already a grand artistic activity.
The theater, the venue for ballet performances, was different from what we have now.
At that time, theaters were mainly used for socializing, blind dates or for some transactions.
We know that the VIP rooms of the theater are on the second floor of the theater or on both sides of the high place.
In fact, it is not convenient to watch the performance, sometimes only part of the performance can be seen, so why is this location the most expensive private room?
Because the private rooms located on the high ground are most likely to be looked up to by the audience below.
In the luxury private room, there is not only food and drink, close the curtain to do whatever you want, but also have the right to enter and exit the dressing room or backstage at will during the performance, which is really "money is power"!
The perspective of our painting is obviously from the luxury private room.
Even a critic at the time said:
"The opera house is the red chamber of high society men (euphemism)."
In fact, the era was an era of contempt for professional women.
When they go out to work on their own, whether they are nurses, sewing women or actors and singers, they are not treated with courtesy, and the only people who can barely be accepted are the tutors.
Ballerinas at that time, no one would think of them as elegant artists.
Most of them are also from the working class, for them, in order to be able to live a good life, try to climb up, than practice hard, find a gold lord is more practical and reliable.
The gold lords were not only rich, but also very powerful, such as spending money to install them in famous operas.
Therefore, they are also very dependent on the power of the gold lord. The gold lord treats the dancers with a sense of superiority and disdain.
From this, we can know that the black figure in the picture is the gold lord of this dancer.
According to Degas's paintings, he seems to love backstage scenes more than painting dancers on stage.
We can also guess what Degas's attitude towards these dancers. Is it sympathy? Ignore? Or don't care at all?
We can find that most of Degas's dancers have blurred faces and do not have their own personalities.
He didn't seem to care who they were, but simply wanted to paint "ballerinas", to paint postures and perform movements as "ballerinas", and perhaps he was more or less prejudiced against this profession.
The painter Gauguin commented: "Degas's dancer is not a woman, but a wonderful line that maintains a balance. Today, it seems that this evaluation is like a direct poke in the heart.
Here's Andrew Coke, sharing art. Welcome everyone to like, pay attention to, forward, leave a message to learn from each other
If you have works or artists that you are interested in, you can tell me in the comments that oh ~ I will try to arrange them for everyone as soon as possible!