Repetitions: Memory and Making Degas's Ballet Classroom Series.

Abstract

This dissertation proposes a significant reevaluation of Edgar Degas’s ballet classroom pictures, with a particular focus on two series: the foyer paintings and the frieze compositions. Its principal objective is to examine the transformative role of repetition—both as a working method and as a register of meaning—in the evolution of the artist’s work from an essentially realist enterprise to a process of endless iteration. Repetition for Degas involved the constant recycling and reorganization of pictorial motifs—dancers, architectural elements, props—as a means of exploring countless formal possibilities. It was also a means by which process, readable in the interrelations between multiple paintings, drawings, and prints, came to eclipse the importance of individual, “finished” artworks, thereby deferring the completion of commercially viable “products” and sustaining the possibility of future works in the series.

The study begins with a rehearsal of related examples of repetition and seriality in modernist painting, along with the prevailing art-historical interpretations of the phenomena. It subsequently focuses on Degas’s establishment of “place” (the term is drawn from Edmond Duranty’s le langage de l’appartement) in the foyer series as a means of signaling a suitable quotient of realist “authenticity.” By drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s theorizations of social space, however, it is demonstrated that Degas’s desire for illusionist manifestations of “place” was challenged by his increasing devotion to the processes of art-making.

Hence the uneven development of the frieze format and the “dancer-motif”—the two defining forms of Degas’s repetition. The increased horizontality of the format prompted the artist to forgo “place” in the interest of generating pictorial spaces in which a familiar repertoire of dancer-motifs could be arranged and rearranged, ad infinitum. This new preoccupation with process appeared in diverse media (drawing, monotype, and even casual doodling), and it involved an approach to composition that extended far beyond the limits of a single work. Degas’s incessant experimentations accordingly spawned a self-referential and mnemonically driven working method exercised in multiple images over extended periods of time. There are parallels here both to Henri Bergson’s notion of duration, and to Paul Valéry’s understanding of the primacy of “craft” in Degas’s art.