The Dancer: Degas, Forain, and Toulouse-Lautrec
PORTLAND, OR - This landmark exhibition, appearing exclusively at the Portland Art Museum February 2 through May 11, 2008, explores the complex image of the dancer in the work of three artists intrigued by various manifestations of dance in fin-de-siècle Paris: Edgar Degas (1834-1917), Jean-Louis Forain (1852-1931), and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901). The Dancer presents an international roster of more than 110 works of art, including rarely seen paintings, pastels, drawings, prints, and sculptures from collections in Europe and the United States.
“The Museum is pleased to present The Dancer, perhaps one of the most ambitious exhibitions we have ever undertaken,” said Brian Ferriso, the Marilyn H. and Dr. Robert B. Pamplin, Jr. Director of the Portland Art Museum. “We are extremely grateful to The Dancer’s many underwriters and the major sponsors of the exhibition catalogue, Janet and Richard Geary, all of whom have made this exceptional visual and educational journey possible.”
“Artists in late 19th-century France produced some of Europe’s most celebrated and revolutionary works of art,” said Ferriso. “Among those innovators are Degas, Forain, and Toulouse-Lautrec, who captured the renowned dancers of Paris, creating potent icons of a unique time, place, and culture.”
About the Period
In the 19th century, the most prominent spectators at the Paris Opéra were the annual subscribers, or abonnés—upper class males, political leaders, industry titans, and financiers.
There was a profound social difference between the spectators and the dancers, many of whom came from the lower class. Rising through the ballet ranks was seen as a way for the dancers, women between ages 18 and 30 as well as younger ballet students, to better their lives and contribute money to their families. The wealthy male abonnés bought the most expensive seats, best views—and the privilege of consorting backstage with the dancers, who felt pressured to succumb to the men’s advances and acquire a supporter or protector. Some dancers remained aloof, but in general, the ballet dancer was associated with the demimonde.
At the more popular cafés-concerts, cabarets, and dance halls, dancers executed the rowdy cancan or its racier version, the chahut. These venues attracted a variety of social classes, from workers to the bourgeoisie and aristocracy. Mixing with the lower classes at these chic yet disreputable places was fashionable for the predominately male audiences, who came not only for the performances but also to make appointments with the cocottes.
About the Exhibition
The Dancer, organized mostly by artist, highlights the different approaches Degas, Forain, and Toulouse-Lautrec took to portraying rapidly changing urban life and depicting the social types, tensions, and contradictions of the dancers and their arenas. Their works, alone and in combination, reveal the underlying social messages conveyed by these images.
“Representations of the dancer by Degas, Forain, and Toulouse-Lautrec are much more than explorations of form,” said Annette Dixon, Ph.D., curator of the exhibition and Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Museum. “Degas emphasizes the artifice of the spectacle and the physical reality of the ballerina’s life behind the scenes. Forain rails against the social inequities that made the exchange of money for sex a dilemma in the dancer’s life. And Lautrec employs sexual references in his depictions of chahuteuses, both to titillate and to stress the humanity of women whom society treated as commodities.”
Edgar Degas
Edgar Degas was a careful observer at the Paris Opéra. His images of ballet dancers performing convey their graceful and seemingly effortless movements. Only rarely did Degas focus on the abonnés or the reality of sexual commerce at the Opéra. Instead, the majority of his dance works record the backstage moments of the dancers’ days, focusing on their arduous training, graceful motions, exhaustion, and casual moments of rest.
In the early 1870s, he gained access to the Opéra’s backstage rehearsals and classrooms—areas where only the dancers, their instructors, their mothers, and those of privilege were allowed. The Dancer features numerous sketches that Degas made, recording the dancers’ daily routines backstage. These served as an arsenal of poses and movements that he could reinterpret in formal works, including his great dance classroom paintings. One of these, The Ballet Class, is included in the exhibition. Degas depicted dancers at all levels, from beginning dancers ages seven to ten, through the ranks of the corps de ballet to the étoile.
Beginning in the mid-1870s, Degas complemented his classroom explorations with a series of small-scale wax sculptures, which he used to study poses. “His groundbreaking work The Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen—startling for its naturalism—is the only wax sculpture he ever exhibited,” said Dixon. “While the artist had expressed interest to his friends in having the sculptures cast in bronze, he never did so. It was only after his death that The Little Dancer and more than seventy small-scale waxes were cast in bronze.” The exhibition includes bronze casts of The Little Dancer and of several of the small-scale waxes.
Jean-Louis Forain
Jean-Louis Forain, introduced to the theme of the dancer by his mentor Degas, also focused on the ballet dancers’ lives backstage at the Opéra—in the wings, corridors, and dressing rooms. Instead of focusing on the dancers’ bodies and movements, Forain, a caricaturist, newspaper illustrator, painter, and draftsman, depicted the dancers’ interactions with the abonnés as observed by his illustrator’s eye. Relying on facial expressions, gestures, and postures to bring a satirical, moralizing narrative aspect to his images, he explored the ballet dancers’ dilemma: to yield to the advances of rich male patrons or suffer economically.
Unlike Degas, who modeled his forms with tone and color, Forain built forms with line, focusing the viewer’s attention on a gesture or glance that suggests a critical narrative moment. “For instance, in an oil on canvas of c. 1880, Behind the Scenes, which depicts a dancer’s attempt to entice a portly man with a demure pose, her knowing look reveals her interest in his advances,” stated Dixon. “By contrast, in an oil on canvas of 1912, On the Stage, an abonné firmly grasps a dancer’s chin as she stands rigid with pride and resistance.”
Forain may have felt a conflict between his working-class origins and his bourgeois aspirations. He sometimes portrayed the abonnés as predators and the dancers as victims needing to master the art of flirtation to secure a protector. At other times, the dancers prey on the abonnés. Although Forain goes back and forth, assigning guilt to one party or the other, he always makes it clear who’s the predator and who’s the prey.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
Degas and Forain preferred the ballet, a subject that Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec treated in early paintings of single ballet dancers, two of which are included in the exhibition. Toulouse-Lautrec was most attracted to the seedy yet popular entertainment scene of Montmartre and the grands boulevards. Toulouse-Lautrec’s paintings, collectors’ prints, and posters of celebrity dancers reveal his uncritical acceptance of the sexual commerce that marked this milieu. The potent sexuality of these performers was, for him, a reflection of their humanity and individuality.
Aside from two oil paintings and one drawing, the exhibition features 23 prints, including the sort of works for which Toulouse-Lautrec is best known: large color lithographic posters advertising star performers at entertainment venues and small collectors' prints relating to celebrities of the era. Toulouse-Lautrec transformed the lithographic poster to a medium that blurred the line between advertising and high art with his commission for the Moulin Rouge poster, featuring star performer La Goulue (Louise Weber). Through Moulin Rouge—La Goulue, a poster that made him famous in Paris, he established the main recurring features in his posters: fashionable dress, sexual references, innuendos, simple design, and compositions that directly engage the viewer’s position.
In numerous works, Toulouse-Lautrec includes depictions of his upper-class circle of male friends to reflect the reality of “slumming” in the entertainment establishments. “In the poster Divan Japonais he shows the literary, music, and art critic Édouard Dujardin accosting the dancer Jane Avril, who appears to ignore him,” said Dixon. In this print, as in others, Toulouse-Lautrec subtly alludes to the prevalence of lesbians, particularly among dancers and performers, and the growing independence and self-actualization among women in Parisian society.
Whether designed to catch the eye and sell the show, or for the private viewer’s enjoyment, Toulouse-Lautrec’s works immortalized dancers in characteristic poses, telling gestures, and signature accessories. With sensitivity to these poses and gestures, he made their sexuality an integral part of their humanity. Focusing on performers who were on the margins of proper society, Toulouse-Lautrec revealed the independence of choice and alternative lifestyles enjoyed by these women, outside the constraints of the bourgeoisie.
The Dancer includes loans from the collections of many distinguished institutions, including the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Kimbell Art Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Musée d’Orsay, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, as well as from private collections in the United States, France, Spain, and the United Kingdom.
The Dancer: Degas, Forain, and Toulouse-Lautrec has been organized by the Portland Art Museum and curated by Annette Dixon, Ph.D., Curator of Prints and Drawings, with the assistance of Marnie P. Stark, Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings, and Ingrid Berger, Curatorial Assistant.
Catalogue
The Dancer is accompanied by a 256-page full-color catalogue illustrating the works in the exhibition. The catalogue also includes essays by exhibition curator Annette Dixon; Degas expert Richard Kendall; the great-granddaughter of Forain, Florence Valdès-Forain; Toulouse-Lautrec authority Mary Weaver Chapin; and ballet historian Jill DeVonyar. The catalogue is available for purchase in the Museum Shop. Members: $35.95; non-members: $39.95.
About the Portland Art Museum
The seventh oldest museum in the United States and the oldest on the West Coast, the Portland Art Museum is internationally recognized for its permanent collection and ambitious special exhibitions drawn from the Museum’s holdings and the world’s finest public and private collections. The Museum’s collection of more than 42,000 objects, displayed in 112,000 square feet of galleries, reflects the history of art from ancient times to today. The collection is distinguished for its holdings of arts of the native peoples of North America, English silver, and the graphic arts. An active collecting institution, dedicated to preserving great art for the enrichment of future generations, the Museum devotes 90 percent of its galleries to its permanent collection. The Museum’s campus of landmark buildings, a cornerstone of Portland’s cultural district, includes the Jubitz Center for Modern and Contemporary Art, the Gilkey Center for Graphic Arts, the Schnitzer Center for Northwest Art, the Northwest Film Center, and the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde Center for Native American Art. With a membership of over 23,000 households and serving more than 350,000 visitors annually, the Museum is a premier venue for education in the visual arts. For information on exhibitions and programs, call 503.226.2811 or visit www.portlandartmuseum.org