Though this exhibition was one of the main reasons for our excursion to Canberra over the last few days (indeed, it was the original stimulus), Degas isn't particularly a touchstone for me, and nor do I know particularly much about him; still, I was interested and a bit excited to see what he was all about.
The exhibition provides a wide cross-section of his work, including a large proportion of prints (etching, lithography, etc) and sketches, including chalk and pastel type work, as well as a fair number of sculptures and even some photography, but relatively few (though still a significant number) of the oil paintings with which I primarily associate him. The ones of dancers tended to most catch my eye and appeal - the subject/motif seems best suited to his ideas about colour, shade and composition, whether in clearer, relatively formally posed and arranged pieces like 'The dance class' (1873-6), or in more ethereal works like the forest scene of 'Dancers, pink and green' (c 1890) in which the dancers resemble fairies, or those somewhere in between such as 'The ballet of "Robert le diable" ' (1871), in which ghostly dancers blur into each other on stage in the background, while the foreground of audience members watching the stage (including one man looking off to the side with a pair of binoculars) is rendered in more distinct outlines. That said, the racecourse ones have an interesting combination of the earthy and crude on the one hand, and the suggestive and abstract on the other, and have their own appeal.
Having looked at this exhibition, I can understand why parallels are drawn between Degas' work and the main stream of the French impressionists, but my sense was that something different is going on in his work, even beyond his rejection of the 'en plein air' technique and the typical impressionist variegated light-and-colour method, something tending more towards abstraction (in the senses of both non-representationality and speaking to something beyond themselves). I haven't been inspired, but I do feel like his art may have more to say to me than I'd previously imagined.
