Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement

The Royal Academy of Arts presents an exhibition focusing on Edgar Degas's preoccupation with movement as an artist of the dance. Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement traces the development of the artist’s ballet imagery throughout his career.

The exhibition is the first to present Degas's progressive engagement with the figure in movement in the context of parallel advances in photography and early film.The exhibition comprises around 85 paintings, sculptures, pastels, drawings, prints and photographs by Degas.

Highlights of the exhibition include such masterpieces as the celebrated sculpture Little Dancer Aged Fourteen (1880-81, cast. c.1922, Tate, London); Dancer Posing for a Photograph (1875, Pushkin State Museum of Art, Moscow) or The Dance Lesson (c. 1879, The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC).

Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement explores the fascinating links between Degas's highly original way of viewing and recording the dance and the inventive experiments being made at the same time in photography by Etienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge and in film-making by such pioneers as the Lumière brothers.

Date: until December 11.
Place: Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London W1J 0BD. United Kingdom.
Opening hours: from Sunday to Thursday from 10am to 6pm. Fridays and Saturdays from 10am to 10pm.

See some of Dega's works in the following slideshow: