Graphic Arts Displays

Display room 69
15 April-7 July 2013

In October 1891, Cross moved down to the Mediterranean coast, an area surrounded by hills covered with pines and cork oaks. The light of the Midi, "this light, [which is] reflected everywhere, devours the local colours and turns the shadows grey" (Signac), inspired Cross in many of his sketches and drawings.

These works on paper were a break from his paintings on canvas and amused him: "The absolute necessity of being fast, bold and even insolent, brings a kind of benevolent fever into the work" he wrote in 1900. For Cross, it was not a question of copying a tree in watercolour but of making a watercolour of a tree, and of "making the colours dance".

Artists discovered non-western dances at the universal exhibitions. Toulouse-Lautrec and Rodin retained the novel gestures of the Asian dances, while those who travelled to the Far East brought back dazzling drawings of magnificent costumes (Perret).

But this was not the only source of exoticism at that time: there was Antiquity, linked to mythology in ballets (Fantin-Latour) and there was the free spirit of the new dances celebrating nature, created around 1900-1910. Music and dance conjured up a golden age of Antiquity (Osbert, Redon) and a Dionysian energy redefined by Nietzsche (Bourdelle, Rodin).

The dancer, like the tightrope walker and the acrobat, defies the constraints of the body. Powdery pastel and chalk, lightly applied graphite and transparent watercolour and ink washes can all express this lightness. But it was the sculptors, faced with the weight of their materials, who were most interested in this quality (Carpeaux, Bernard, Rodin).
Artists turned to dance in an attempt to capture movement: the sequence of positions and gestures, the whirling and rhythm of the body (Cappiello, Dehodencq).

Drawing, an art form that has an inherent immediacy, can be rapidly executed, and modified, varied or erased. Whether observed from life or based on a photograph or chronophotograph, drawings of dance bring out the concern for gesture shared by dancer and artist alike.
Male and female dancers with their supple bodies, whether scantily clad, in beautiful costumes or veiled, are objects of desire. The freedom of the body is associated with a freedom from moral restraint, real or inferred, in the cabaret dancer and the ballerina. The dance show belongs in the world of late night entertainment and pleasure (Bottini, Toulouse-Lautrec).

Degas inspired Paul Valéry's essay Degas. Dance. Drawing (1936). Although he often drew ballerinas at rest or in rehearsal, Degas also conveyed the exhilaration and the magic of dance.

Using tracing paper and constantly reworking the image, he comes to understand the dancer: her body and its twisting movements, the performance and its glittering spectacle, the lone figure and the group, the hard work and the effortless grace, the fine line between maintaining or losing balance.
In order to master his dancers' every gesture, he drew them hundreds of times, in various media such as graphite, charcoal, ink and pastel.