The exhibition Degas and the Ballet succeeds in its main objective of showing how Degas’s punctiliousness and openness to new styles and technologies shaped his portrayals of dancers. The essence of ballet for Degas was movement: rapid movement, controlled movement, extraordinary and almost unnatural movement. For him the ballet became an obsession as did another field of movement, the race course. In this context, horses and women were much the same to Degas, bodies that moved with speed and elegance.
Curiously, many of his finest works in the exhibition convey to the viewer not movement but rather the static capturing of the difficult and precarious positions that the dancers had to adopt, as in The Rehearsal (1873–78) or even Two Dancers on the Stage (1874). There are here many fine sketches, paintings, and a sculpture of dancers in repose, getting ready, waiting, resting, and fatigued.
In his masterpiece The Rehearsal (1874), it is not the impending movement of the dancers at the back of the scene that fascinates, but the setting, the placing of them between high bright windows at the end of a long stretch of open floor. The floor slides between two dominant static features in the foreground, a meticulously portrayed spiral staircase to the left and a group of waiting dancers to the right. Also noticeable in this work is the careful attention paid to the wall at the back, whose lowest part has been painted a darker scuff-proof color and the careful