Out of pastels: Degas’ dance repertoire

Out of pastels: Degas’ dance repertoire
“Drawing is not the same as form, it is a way of seeing form.” Edgar Degas.[J. D. McClatchy “Masters” in Twenty Questions (Columbia University Press, 1 Apr 1999 - Literary Criticism) 173. ]
Degas developed mastery in depicting movement as identified in his rendition of dancers as well as female nudes. The portraits associated with Degas are characteristic of psychological complexity as well as their portrayal of human isolation. Degas was an expert in capturing fleeting movement within his numerous works by use of a series of pastels, paintings, drawings as well as monotypes and ultimately wax sculpture and photography.[Shelley, Marjorie. "A Disputed Pastel Reclaimed for Degas: Two Dancers, Half-Length." Metropolitan Museum Journal 51, no. 1 (2016): 128-145.]
Degas's paintings were commonly associated with inherent movement and action with his method considered to be the exact opposite of the Impressionists. He experimented with new techniques (monotype) as well as revitalised rather neglected mediums (pastel and gouache) thus achieving effects foreign to oil paint. At the same time, he tried to find out the alternatives that could replace traditional gilt frames. These actions encompass the act of revolutionizing his environment on the framing of subjects within the composition and addressed the immediate environment of the picture that includes the décor as well as the lighting of the room exhibition.[Thomson, Richard. Edgar Degas: Waiting. Getty Publications, 1995.]
Although Degas experimented with a range of mediums that even include photography, my scope of analysis is centred on his pastels works. These offered him the possibility of simultaneous line and colour. It also allowed him to be at his utmost innovative which he frequently used in combination with monotype, softening them over steam or mixing them with a fixative to form a paint-like paste which he could then work into with a stiff brush or his fingers.
Degas’s response to the ballet was founded on the notion of incessant work: physical exercises on the part of the dancer, finding form on the part of the artist. The art form served as subject for a good half of Edgar Degas’s prolific output as an artist. These iterations of dancers and their métier originated from his exhibit at the salon of 1868, with the “portrait on stage” of Mademoiselle Fiocre (Fig.1) and continued through the schematic drawings made until the dawn of his career around 1910. His interest in ballet dancers thus intensified from the 1870’s and rendered the production of approximately 1,500 works on the subject. The majority of which are studies that address the movement of the human body, exploring the physicality and discipline of the dancers through the use of contorted postures and unexpected vantage points.
Fig. 1
Degas believed in committing a subject to memory through repeated drawing, and when he felt he had arrived at a full understanding of it he would synthetize his many studies into a thought-out composition.
In some instances, his heavily pigmented charcoal drawings could be passed through the press that resulted in ...