For today’s audiences entranced by cell phone entertainments, the idea of going to a grand communal event is a rarity if not a total unknown. But there was a time when entertainment aimed at conveying a larger national character.  For nineteenth century France, the Paris Opera declaimed itself the grandest of the grand—it was the nation’s cultural and social center, and people dressed in high foppery to showcase the importance of being French. It was all about unabashed spectacle.

To celebrate the 350^th anniversary of the Paris Opera, the Musees d’Orsay et de l’Orangerie in Paris and Washington’s National Gallery of Art have co-organized a stunning exhibition that conveys the essence of this spectacle. For contemporary audiences, DEGAS AT THE OPERA also exudes a wonder and exuberance that reminds us how vital art and culture are to our lives today.

Edgar Degas (1834-1917) is well-known for his paintings of ballet dancers, but this exhibition is the first to place these paintings within the larger context of the Paris Opera itself. It was the theatrical world of music, color, make-believe, and above all movement that Degas adored and adopted as his artistic laboratory from the 1860s to the early 1890s.  Over and over, he depicted the Opera’s world onstage, backstage, in the orchestra, and in the audience:  the entirety became his focal point for experimentation.

The Opera proved to be a superb canvas, evoking colorful stage settings and costumes, a variety of characters, and intriguing lighting, both from gaslight and then from electricity. The dancers were the perfect vehicle for Degas to explore movement, and he captured them relentlessly as they rehearsed, waited in the wings, and performed. His portrayals didn’t distinguish between dance classes or rehearsals—he was never an expert on dance itself, and didn’t really care about anything except conveying an essence of purpose: how did bodies move at particular times to evoke meaning?

While Degas focused on the dancers, his larger intention was to portray the overall experience of being at the Opera. He happily painted singers, musicians, and members of the audience to fill in the outlines of the Opera’s character. He portrayed people in familiar poses but from fascinating new angles, and in this “staged” his Opera canvases much in the spirit of how the Paris Opera itself staged its productions.

In his painting of the Paris Opera orchestra, he places the bassoonist (a friend of Degas) front-and-center, with other musicians surrounding him in profile.  In reality, orchestras in this era looked forward to a conductor standing near the stage and facing the prompt box—but why paint something so ‘real’ when the bassoonist afforded such a richer sense of the orchestra’s identity? In another painting, Degas depicts a woman gazing down from her box—happy to be observed and only secondarily focused on the stage performance.

Degas was an A-List subscriber to the Paris Opera from 1885 to 1892. This subscription gave him full access to roaming the Opera, and to mingling backstage. He didn’t flinch at portraying the rich voyeurs who lurked backstage waiting to take advantage of the young dancers, and often painted the predators in black profile as they waited to prey on the young ballerinas—most of whom came from poverty and were entirely vulnerable to exploitation.

The exhibition also displays some of Degas’s charcoal drawings of dancers, which he produced incessantly to explore different possibilities of movement. Another room is devoted to what Degas called his “orgies of color”—vibrant and jarring pastel canvases he worked on when his eyesight began to fail.

The final room in the exhibition is the National Gallery’s own treasure—Degas’s original beeswax statue “Little Dancer Aged Fourteen.” Degas noted the young dancer’s name, Marie van Goethem, in his journal, and we know that she was born into a poor Belgian family that settled in Paris in 1865. She became a student at the Paris Opera’s school of dance in 1878, and shortly thereafter began posing for Degas.  Alas, her time posing took her away from time she was supposed to be rehearsing, and the Paris Opera fired her.  We know nothing of her after this. She has totally disappeared from the historical record while her sculpture has achieved lasting fame.

As much as Degas had immersed himself in the Paris Opera, he stopped going in the early 1890s when they changed their repertory from music he liked –notably Gluck—to the music of Wagner, which he intensely disliked.  But the Opera had worked its magic in the formative years of the artist’s life, and that record remains vibrant.

DEGAS AT THE OPERA was to be at the National Gallery until July 5^th, but is closed indefinitely because of the coronavirus pandemic.  The Gallery has a Degas online exhibit that includes 17 of the 100 or so works in the exhibition, and there is a substantial, highly-illustrated catalogue (DEGAS AT THE OPERA) edited by d’Orsay curator Henri Loyrette and published by both museums.

By Amy Henderson, Contributing Writer

DEGAS AT THE OPERA, Washington National Gallery of Art through July 5, 2020.