Whenever I see Edgar Degas's work, I subconsciously marvel at his "remarkable composition." In Degas's paintings, the model often does not stand in the center of the painting, especially the ballet dancers he has devoted his life to depicting. The ballet dancers in Degas's paintings are either scratching their bodies, taking off their shoes, or waiting wearily behind the stage for the stage. Degas does not show the unrealistic, elegant, elf-like feeling that the art of ballet brings to people, and he sees the ballet dancer as a laborer who completes the work. If you look closely, you will find that most of the ballet dancers in Degas's paintings are facing the sky, or have small eyes and crooked mouths. Even so, the ballet dancers in Degas's paintings still give a sense of elegance, the true beauty of humanity given by youth and the flesh. They danced with exhaustion, their posture was not graceful, closer to distortion, but the genius painter could dig out the existence of beauty from them.
The same is true of the painting Two Dancers on a Stage, which in a way is more like a snapshot of an untaken ballet rehearsal. The stage floor occupies most of the frame, and the wrist of the ballerina on the right is cut out of the outer frame. One of the most basic common senses for taking photographs of people is to "try not to cut off people's arms and legs", and Degas deliberately cut the ballet dancer's left arm outside the canvas, and it is precisely because of this unique composition that it injects life into the painting. In other words, the painting looks like a snapshot taken in an instant during a ballet performance. The two ballet dancers in the picture are not the protagonists of the ballet performance, but the dancers in the group dance, because behind them are the stage background and edge area, and the protagonist does not stand in a small corner of the stage to dance. But if it is a group dancer, it should be densely lined up with other actors, but the stage in front of the dancers on the left is empty, so this may not be an actual performance, but taken from the scene during the stage rehearsal. The posture of the ballet dancer standing on the left is very elegant, but if you look closely, you will find that she looks very ugly, her forehead and mouth are protruding, and her nose is also collapsed. In this regard, some harsh comments said: "Where is the human, obviously it is an ape." It is impossible for Degas not to be unaware of this, but there is a theory that Degas may have deliberately painted the faces of ballet dancers as apes, showing that they did not belong to the upper class by "not having a well-evolved face.". If this is the case, before becoming a good painter, one must first be a man with a brain.
Two Ballerinas, like Renoir's Box, was created in 1874. If it is an accidental agreement, this is too subtle. Although both men modeled on working-class women and both chose the same theme "theater", the styles were very different. Renoir is the beauty of the dreamlike eternal elegance of the existence of women, and the dancing ballet dancers in Degas's paintings are not the protagonists, they are just the no-name pawns standing in the small corner of the audience's eyes. These unsightly girls are just a group of dancers, not heroes with excellent dance skills, silently standing in the corner of the stage and dancing, which is the ballet dancer under Degas's brush. Even so, in the dancing woman, there is still a youthful and feminine beauty. Degas created their imperfect appearance, but gave them the most beautiful soul. His vision was cold and warm, and this wonderful contradiction was the unique charm of Degas that could not be found in other painters.