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Course: Europe 1800 - 1900 > Unit 5
Lesson 3: Impressionism- A beginner's guide to Impressionism
- What does “Impressionism” mean?
- How the Impressionists got their name
- Impressionist color
- Impressionist pictorial space
- Japonisme
- Degas, The Bellelli Family
- Degas, At the Races in the Countryside
- Degas, The Dance Class
- Degas, Visit to a Museum
- Caillebotte, The Floor Scrapers
- Gustave Caillebotte, Paris Street; Rainy Day
- Caillebotte, Man at his Bath
- Morisot, The Cradle
- A summer day in Paris: Morisot's Hunting Butterflies
- Cassatt, In the Loge
- Cassatt, Little Girl in a Blue Armchair
- Cassatt, Woman with a Pearl Necklace in a Loge
- Cassatt, The Loge
- Cassatt, The Child's Bath
- Mary Cassatt, The Coiffure
- Cassatt, Breakfast in Bed
- How to recognize Monet: The Basin at Argenteuil
- Claude Monet, Impression, Sunrise
- Monet, The Argenteuil Bridge
- Painting modern life: Monet's Gare Saint-Lazare
- Monet, The Gare Saint-Lazare
- Monet, Cliff Walk at Pourville
- Monet's Wheatstacks (Snow Effect, Morning): Getty conversations
- Monet, Poplars
- Monet, Rouen Cathedral Series
- Monet, Water Lilies
- How to Recognize Renoir: The Swing
- Renoir, La Loge
- Renoir, The Grands Boulevards
- Renoir, Moulin de la Galette
- Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Portrait of Madame Charpentier and Her Children
- Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party
- Renoir, The Large Bathers
- Impressionism
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Degas, The Dance Class
Edgar Degas, The Dance Class, oil on canvas, 1874 (Metropolitan Museum of Art) Speakers: Dr. Steven Zucker, Dr. Beth Harris. Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.
Want to join the conversation?
- Why was Degas so obsessed with painting ballerinas?(13 votes)
- It might be useful to draw comparisons to some of Degas' other favorite subjects, horses. Superficially, both horses and ballerinas were muscular and move quickly and gracefully, posing a challenge to a painter. On a different level, tickets to the ballet or horse-races provided entertainment to the bourgeois and nouveau riche markets in France at the time; catering to the same people who were beginning to build art collections. These business magnates would have had an interest in starting their art collection by buying into Impressionists' new style of artwork (as opposed to artwork by members of the Academy). Look at the painting A Cotton Office in New Orleans (1873) for an example of who would be buying this work. Paintings by Degas met a market of wealthy businessmen who worked constantly and needed pictures of ballerinas and horses as decoration and to convince themselves and those around them that money could buy sophistication and that culture was clearly out of the hands of the monarchy and aristocracy, who would have built a collection of (for instance) stylized family portraits to draw attention to the importance of their inherited wealth.(33 votes)
- i wonder what song is on the music sheet in the left hand corner.(4 votes)
- Swan lake, or maybe the Nutcracker suite?(6 votes)
- what was ungainly mean (1:46)(4 votes)
- It means awkward and clumsy. It's something you wouldn't think of when you picture ballerinas. You'd think: graceful, flowing, beautiful, but not awkward and clumsy.(7 votes)
- Could someone name some other famous ballet paintings or which featured a dance class?(3 votes)
- Look at the paintings of Jean Beraud, a contemporary of the Impressionists who also painted scenes of the ballet. See, for example, his "Wings at the Opera" of 1889.(1 vote)
- Are these girls or women? I really cannot tell the age for the life of me...could that be intentional ambiguity or is that just me?(2 votes)
- why is the 2 speakers trying to talk over each other(2 votes)
- I guess they're excited about the topic. If you look up a video of the two of them talking about their web page, www.smarthistory.org , you'll see that they really do like each other.(1 vote)
- It looks to me as if the ceiling and the trim look a little crooked. Is that true?(2 votes)
- At3:58, they talk about the perspective of the room being exaggerated in order to create an asymmetry or even a sense of motion in the scene, which was a very Impressionistic thing to do.(1 vote)
- Is Degas an artist he knows a lot and talks a lot about paintings(0 votes)
- Degas died in 1917, so he's not talkin' much these days. He was an artist, and probably talked a lot about painting. He also sculpted and was very interested in photography. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Degas(7 votes)
- Why are the girls so nervous?
Are they being tested?(0 votes) - Maby he took bellet or he thought they were pretty(0 votes)
Video transcript
[MUSIC PLAYING] SPEAKER 1: We're on the second
floor of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and we're
looking at a painting by Degas, "The Dance Class." And this is a painting that
was, according to the wall text, originally intended for the very
first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, but not actually
shown until two years later. SPEAKER 2: Actually,
when you said that, thinking about that very first
Impressionist exhibition, the first moment when this
group of artists decided, you know, we're not going
to show at the Salon. We're going to create
our own exhibition space. And how incredibly normal
that seems to us today. SPEAKER 1: But it was radical. SPEAKER 2: Completely
radical to not show in the official exhibition. SPEAKER 1: Now,
didn't they actually borrow the photographer's
studio-- Nadar-- on the Boulevard des Capucines? SPEAKER 2: They did. But there was a real concern
that not enough people would come to see it, they
wouldn't become known, they wouldn't become
famous, no one would buy their work,
how would they eat? Because if they showed their
work at the official exhibition at the Salon-- SPEAKER 1: Everybody went. SPEAKER 2: Right. SPEAKER 1: But I think we know
who the Impressionists are. SPEAKER 2: Yes, we do. SPEAKER 1: So they
were fairly successful. SPEAKER 2: They did the
right thing in the end. SPEAKER 1: There were
some really hilarious-- and some positive reviews
and some really scathingly sarcastic reviews-- SPEAKER 2: Yes. SPEAKER 1: --of that first
Impressionist exhibition. SPEAKER 2: Well, this a pretty
outrageous painting, really. SPEAKER 1: It does't look so
outrageous to us now, does it? SPEAKER 2: No, it
looks beautiful to us. SPEAKER 1: It looks
like a snapshot. SPEAKER 2: This
woman in the center whose body comes out of the
two heads of these other two standing women-- SPEAKER 1: We have
faces obscured. SPEAKER 2: And she seems to
have her fingers in her mouth. SPEAKER 1: What's interesting
is that despite the fact that we assume right off
that the ballerinas are beautiful and graceful, many
of the ballerinas-- in fact, if not all of them-- with
the exception of the one who's performing,
are really rendered in a very ungainly way. SPEAKER 2: Actually,
she looks even pretty-- SPEAKER 1: Ungainly herself. SPEAKER 2: Ungainly to
me, yeah-- her gestures. SPEAKER 1: And actually, you
can see what's happening. This is a little narrative here. You have the dancers
waiting their turn. SPEAKER 2: Waiting, right. SPEAKER 1: You have
the dance master, the male with the staff. SPEAKER 2: Right. SPEAKER 1: And then, you
have the one dancer who's moving across the floor, and
then, the young women who are finished. SPEAKER 2: Right. And the mirror, of
course, that they're practicing in front
of that gives us a sense of the window
that must be outside of the painting on the
right side, through which-- SPEAKER 1: It's illuminating. They see the city through it. And this is really all
about this new, urban world, this culture of pleasure. SPEAKER 2: The
city, of [INAUDIBLE] of performance and leisure. These women who are
in the back, just sort of hanging out, and
sitting around with their hands on their hips. SPEAKER 1: Well, those might
actually be the escorts, right? SPEAKER 2: That's
the older ones, not in tutus, are their mothers. SPEAKER 1: Yes, that's right. SPEAKER 2: And the
ballerinas were the sort of little bit kind of
like the movie stars of today. Right? They were-- SPEAKER 1: Even with a
little of that risque-- SPEAKER 2: Sought after. SPEAKER 1: And that little
bit of that risque element involved. The notion of the
ungainliness is so clear when you look for it. Look at the dancer who's
in the very foreground, just in back of the music stand. It looks as if she's
hiking her tutu up. SPEAKER 2: And someone behind
her, the woman behind her, somehow fixing something
about her tutu by her hips. SPEAKER 1: You're right. And the other one has
her fingers in her mouth. She's biting her nails. SPEAKER 2: And we can't see
the bottom of her body at all. She just-- SPEAKER 1: She grows out. SPEAKER 2: Her torso
seems to grow out of these three heads of these
three figures in the front. Another figure on the
left sort of looks out at something
outside of the-- This is not a self-contained,
clear narrative, which is exactly what would have
been presented at the Salon. SPEAKER 1: It completely breaks
all the compositional rules that history-- SPEAKER 2: And narrative rules. Right? SPEAKER 1: That's right. But there must
have been something intensely modern about this
notion of an image that seemed so momentary
and so unchoreographed. SPEAKER 2: Right. But of course, we know that
it was graphed by Degas. SPEAKER 1: And of course it's-- SPEAKER 2: And carefully
planned, and mapped, and structured-- SPEAKER 1: A perfect
metaphor for the subject. Right? SPEAKER 2: Right. The way that the perspective
of the room is exaggerated, this very asymmetrical thing
that Degas does very often, where the whole bottom
right corner is empty. SPEAKER 1: And look
at what that does. You have this incredible
velocity of the perspective, especially in terms
of the ceiling line. But then-- you're
right-- the bottom right is completely empty. And it's almost doing
a kind of east Asian or Japanese kind of-- SPEAKER 2: Asymmetry. SPEAKER 1: Not only
asymmetry, but also creating a kind of flat plane-- SPEAKER 2: Right, absolutely. SPEAKER 1: --for us. And in a sense very much
at odds with the velocity of this tension that develops
between the two-dimensionality of the bottom right and the
hyper three-dimensionality of the upper left. SPEAKER 2: That's right. SPEAKER 1: Of course,
there's this other issue. We are here viewing
something that is very intimate and
very spontaneous. We, as the viewer, are
much different from that-- SPEAKER 2: That people
wouldn't be allowed to see. SPEAKER 1: Or do we
have the privilege to view, then, of
the dance master. What's so interesting
is that we're really about at his eye
level, aren't we? And in a sense, we are
another sort of view. We have that-- SPEAKER 2: Insiders. It's like having
backstage tickets. SPEAKER 1: Except that
they don't notice us. SPEAKER 2: No, they
don't notice us at all. [MUSIC PLAYING]