From 2018... The Sordid Truth behind Degas’s Ballet Dancers

From 2018... The Sordid Truth behind Degas’s Ballet Dancers. Julia Fiore. Artsy, Oct 1 2018. https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-sordid-truth-degass-ballet-dancers

Excerpts:

The coteries of young women in flowering tutus who populate the approximately 1,500 paintings, monotypes, and drawings Degas dedicated to the ballet are among the French artist’s most universally beloved artworks. At first glance, Degas has rendered the sort of pretty, innocent world one might associate with a 6-year-old’s first recital. These works actually speak to an insidious culture that would be shocking to contemporary audiences.

Although it enjoyed unprecedented popularity in Degas’s era, the ballet—and the figure of the ballerina—had suffered a demoralizing fate by the late 1800s. Performances had been reduced to tawdry interludes in operas, the spectacle serving as an enticing respite for concertgoers, who could ogle the dancers’ uncovered legs.

These relationships always involved an unbalanced power dynamic. Young female members of the corps de ballet entered the academy as children. Many of these ballerinas-in-training, derisively called “petits rats,” came from working-class or impoverished backgrounds. They often joined the ballet to support their families, working grueling, six-day weeks.

And so dancers’ earnings and careers were beholden to the abonnés prowling backstage. They were expected to submit to the affections of these subscribers, and were frequently encouraged by their own mothers to fan the flames of male desire. Such relationships could offer lifelines for the impoverished dancers; not only did these aristocrats and financiers hold powerful positions in society, their patronage underwrote the opera’s operations.

Men like these had authority over who obtained plum roles and who was cast off. As a girl’s “patron,” he could provide her with an opulent lifestyle, paying for a comfortable apartment or private lessons to elevate her standing in the ballet corps. The brothel culture of the ballet was so pervasive, as historian Lorraine Coons remarks in her essay “Artiste or coquette? Les petits rats of the Paris Opera ballet,” that even successful dancers who did not resort to prostitution would likely have been suspected to have done so anyway.

“People call me the painter of dancing girls,” Degas once explained to Parisian art dealer Ambroise Vollard. “It has never occurred to them that my chief interest in dancers lies in rendering movement and painting pretty clothes.” But Degas didn’t care tremendously about the ballet as an art form, let alone frilly pastel tutus. He endeavored to capture the reality of the ballet that lurked behind the artifice of the cool, carefully constructed choreography.

Life was cruel to French ballet dancers, and they didn’t have it much easier at the hands of Degas himself. Although the artist was known to reject the advances of his models, his callousness manifested in other ways. To capture the physicality and discipline of the dancers, Degas demanded his models pose for hours at a time, enduring excruciating discomfort as they held their contorted positions. He wanted to capture his “little monkey girls,” as he called them, “cracking their joints” at the barre. “I have perhaps too often considered woman as an animal,” he once told the painter Pierre Georges Jeanniot in a moment of revealing honesty.

Degas was undoubtedly a merciless, cantankerous man. He was a misogynist—peers seemed almost afraid of his antagonism towards women—an especially troubling reputation considering the already sexist norms of his society.