The Artificial Heart

To the average spectator, Swan Lake seems a sprightly cavalcade of carefree ballerinas twirling effortlessly in tutus. Only audiences in the front rows and the impresario in the wings can hear the thump of toe on board, see the straining muscles and the sweat trickling down the dancers' necks. The same disparity exists between the popular concept of ballet's greatest portraitist, Edgar Hilaire Germain Degas, as an easygoing sentimentalist and the historical fact:

Degas was a merciless misogynist and a maddening perfectionist.

What appealed to him was less the femininity of his ballet dancers than their muscular selfdiscipline, the way in which they were drilled to combine style with precision--just as he disciplined himself. "To produce good fruit," he once wrote to a friend, "one must be trained against the wall like an espalier and remain in that position all one's life, with arms outstretched and mouth open to take in what goes by, what is around one, and draw sustenance from it."

Icy Aristocrat. Examples of what Degas' dedication could produce were on view last week at the City Art Museum of St. Louis where, to mark the 50th anniversary of his death, Canada's Jean Sutherland Boggs, the leading authority on Degas, has assembled 157 drawings in charcoal, pencil, gouache, pastel and watercolor (see color page). The exhibition, which travels next to Philadelphia and Minneapolis, is both a bravura display of his technique and a documentation of some of the reasons why his contemporaries described his nudes as "froglike," his dancers as "monkey-faced" and "precociously depraved."

To Degas, of course, he was simply recording life as he saw it with the icy detachment of an aristocrat. A dandified eccentric whose wealthy family spelled its name De Gas, he frequented the ballet and the paddock at Long-champ for his subject matter, but he never forgot the gulf separating him from the world of jockeys and Opera rats (young ballet dancers). He was a wit, a snob, an arrant anti-Semite who broke with lifelong friends over the Dreyfus affair. He never married because, as he explained, he couldn't bear the idea of a wife coming in and exclaiming "Now, that's a pretty picture you've painted!"

Prickly Affection. "Nothing in art should seem accidental," he maintained, "not even movement." To exploit the full possibilities of the human figure, he deliberately forced his models and dancers to assume dozens of different and often agonizingly unnatural poses. "When you work for Degas," grumbled one ballerina, "you can feel every bone in your body." From an early insistence on line, acquired from the study of the great draftsman Jean Auguste Ingres (TIME, Feb. 17), Degas in his later work became enthralled with color, using it to convey the hallucinatory world of the stage. "Orange," he told Berthe Morisot, "gives color; green neutralizes; violet gives shading."

When companies of Russian dancers performed in Paris from 1895 to 1909, he relished the contrast between the unbridled brilliance of their national costume and their rigorous enmeshment in the dance, using the full richness of his palette to capture the barbaric richness of the dancers' native dress and the joyous swirl of their steps. And, as Degas mastered the art of portraying dancers, he eventually developed a prickly affection for them. "There's something artificial even about my heart," he confessed. "The dancers have sewn it up in a bag made of pink satin, rather faded pink satin, like their ballet shoes."

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