Degas and the Dance

“People call me the painter of dancing girls,” Edgar Degas once said. “It has never occurred to them that my chief interest in dancers lies in rendering movement and painting pretty clothes.” Degas’s “rendering of movement” in his images of ballet dancers in tutus as they stretched into pliés, fussed with their costumes, and dashed past him from stage to foyer is the subject of the focus exhibition Degas and the Dance at the Toledo Museum of Art (October 15, 2015–January 10, 2016), which brings together important loans from the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Phillips Collection, the National Gallery of Art, and the Musée d’Orsay, along with works from the Toledo Museum of Art’s own collection.

With explorations of 16 works of art, this companion catalogue also includes essays that place Degas’s images of the ballet in the context...

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