↓↓ Contemporary art articles - older art articles →→Page one|Artists abc |Read about| See exhibitons|The museums|The channel | German Art Archives

7/24/2015

Edgar Degas - J. Paul Getty Museum

“Russian Dancers” and the Art of Pastel

One of Degas’s great late works, Russian Dancers (circa 1899), is on loan to the Getty Museum as the centerpiece of a special installation of late 19th-century French pastels. (19.05.2015 – 11.10.2015).
In this pastel, 


>> Edgar Degas 1834 Paris † 1917 Paris

 celebrates the rambunctious abandon, bright colors, and elaborate folk costumes of Ukrainian peasant dancers, very much in contrast to the ethereal ballerinas for which he is famous. To Degas, the Russian peasants embodied the primitive and visceral human urge to dance. He captured this exuberance by applying layers of pure color on paper, artfully combining the immediacy of drawing with the vibrancy of painting.
Russian Dancers is joined by a selection of works from the permanent collection that depict Paris’s flashy popular entertainments. These include Pierre Bonnard’s Le Moulin Rouge (1889) and At the Circus: Entering the Ring (1899) by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. (Text: Getty Museum)