 Welcome to Barnes takeout. My name is Martha Lucy. I'm deputy director for research, interpretation and education at the Barnes and today we are going to be looking together at a work by Edgar Degas called group of dancers and you see it right over here in this is room nine of the Barnes Foundation and it hangs opposite another work by Degas showing dancers. The ballet was one of Degas favorite subjects and it's the subject for which he is best known through the course of his career. He did something like 1500 works depicting dancers and he did these in all mediums. He worked in sculpture. He worked in oil on canvas. He did pastels, which is what you're seeing here and he did graphite and charcoal drawing. Now I want to make clear that the ballerinas that he's showing here are ballerinas that were part of the Paris opera. The core of dancers was an integral or is an integral part of the opera and Degas had a subscription to the Paris opera. He was he was a fan of opera and of dance and he would go and he would. He would capture what he was seeing there and a lot of times he shows you the dancers on stage performing. He shows sometimes the orchestra in the pit, but most of most times what he's doing is going behind the scenes of bringing us behind the scenes and showing us dancers that are rehearsing or resting or waiting in the wings to go on or in their dressing rooms getting ready like lacing up their shoes or sort of fastening their costumes. And another thing that he shows in a lot of these ballet scenes, you don't see it in this particular work, but in many you will see men in top hats kind of in the like at the at the periphery watching the dancers. And this was something that happened at the time. The wealthy patrons of the opera could pay for backstage access. They could go into the dancers dressing rooms and so that's a sort of an aspect of modern life that Degas is capturing in some of these scenes. But one of the things that I love about Degas depictions of the ballet is the way that he shows it as work. He shows the ballet as labor. So he kind of he kind of challenges that that the sort of fantasy that the ballet presents of bodies that move effortlessly and perfectly at all times. You know, just this continual classical elegance and he is showing these dancers as real people who make actual real movements in real and real life and who are not always graceful. And so here you've got a ballerina who is leaning over and, you know, she's rubbing her feet. She looks tired. You can tell by the way that her back is kind of is hunched over. He sort of accentuates this area with the light. I think to, I don't know, when I look at it, it makes me feel like pain in my back. I can sort of feel that. But also this here, this elbow, I'm always drawn to that because it's it's sort of a, you know, a clumsy pose. I mean, it's a very natural pose, but it's not a jutting out elbow like this is not one that you normally see on the ballet stage. So these dancers seem to be sort of taking a break, talking to each other, rubbing their feet. And one thing that we can that we can tell about the scene is that it is taking place on stage. And then you can tell that because of the light. It's not the kind of natural light that would have come into the rehearsal studio. It is a harsh, bright overhead spotlight that is falling. You know, he's really using it to highlight the limbs and the back here and it falls on the arms. On stage, we don't know, though, if it's a rehearsal or if this is a dancer taking a break during a performance. I'm guessing that it is a rehearsal and I'm saying that based on the costumes. They're they're a little they're a little bit plain. There's no decoration in the hair, which is something that you would see a lot during a performance, but I'm not sure. Now, the medium here is pastel and that's a really important part of this work. Pastel was a medium that was very popular during the 18th century in France and England, and it was used a lot for portraits because pastel allowed the artists to really blend so much. And so you could create these sort of flesh textures that were just just so smooth and kind of blended. But it eventually fell out of favor because it was deemed to to feminine a medium. And Douga brings it back in the late 19th century and it becomes one of his primary media and he really makes it into a modern into a modern medium. And one of the ways that he does that is by not blending so much. So when you're looking at this, you can see individual marks, you can see the individual marks of the pastel crayon and I should add that this is oil pastel, not the crumblier chalk pastel. And so you can see how he's when he applying these layers sort of layers upon layers and blending sometimes, but mostly not. And the way that he prevents the crayon from smudging is by applying a fixative after he applies a layer so that that so that those marks are held in place. But I love looking at these sort of individual moments, the way that he is using color, this little dash over here of purple, and just kind of looking at all the stuff that's going on along the neckline here of her costume, these little dots. And then the arm I mean just look at this, the squiggly line that's meant to represent light. He's just so free with the pastel crayon here. He's so he's so kind of messy with it. And also just look at the way that the light is just sitting right on top of the body. Now the tutu pastel is really such a perfect medium for rendering tutus because it really just kind of captures the gauzy kind of layering of the tutu and you can tell that he's just kind of loving rendering that tutu. It fills up, I don't know, half almost of the composition and it's it's of this kind of electric greenish yellow. So that wraps up the barn's takeout for today. I hope you enjoyed it. Please subscribe to our YouTube channel and feel free to leave a comment. We love hearing from you. Thank you. Newbauer family executive director of the barn's foundation. I hope you enjoyed barn's takeout. Subscribe and make sure your post notifications are on to get daily servings of art. Thanks for watching and for your support of the barn's foundation.