| dc.description.abstract | Remembered primarily for his avant-garde representations of ballet, Edgar Degas left over fifteen hundred paintings, pastels, drawings, prints and sculptures of dancers. Modern scholarship acknowledges Degas being inspired by the exotic aesthetic of Japanese woodblock prints and later technical innovations such as stop-action photography by Eadweard Muybridge, and more importantly, by French scientist and amateur artist Etienne-Jules Marey. Utilizing lessons gleaned from these contemporary visual innovations, Degas chose to express modernity and action via young women dancing for the pleasure of their male audience. Through social context and a discussion of these influences, I will show how Degas's ballet pictures held an explicit sexual meaning to his contemporary male audience through movement, gesture, and his organization of open space. I argue that Degas changed his painting style through the incorporation of these visual influences and loaded his artworks with easily legible sexual code by portraying motion as realistically and believably as possible. By attempting to bridge the gap between an actual dance performance and a two-dimensional representation of dance through the illusion of motion, Degas made sexually charged, yet socially acceptable art. During this period, scientists and artists were also attempting to show continuous motion, and Degas was attacking the same problem, using such devices as the fragmentation of bodies, blurring, cropping, unusual points of view and the allowance of open space for the dancers' anticipated movement. | en_US |
