National Gallery blockbuster Degas at the Opera explores a cultural machine

Why, for example, the portrait of Degass 1867-1868 by Eugnie Fiocre, principal dancer of the ballet, shows the young woman caught between a landscape and a staging, with what seems to be a real horse drinking in a real pool next to her, and her rejected ballet slippers? Did she dance the scene in reality? Or did the imagination of painters do what so many minds in the theater have deluded into something that seems as real or more real than everything that happens in the world? Outside?

And why, in one of the most acclaimed paintings by painters, Robert the Devil's Ballet, is the orchestra so strangely, with a prominent member of the public at the front, not looking at the ghostly nuns dancing on stage, but suddenly to the left? And why are so many of these paintings, especially those of the young women of the corps de ballet, arranged like elongated landscapes, often crossed by a clear diagonal, as if the painter saw the world through thin and rectangular glasses?

Degas and the Opra includes around 100 works, including many of the artist's most essential images inspired by the Paris Opera, which included both the opera and the ballet. This iteration of the exhibition, which opened at the DOrsay Museum, is smaller but easier to navigate: in Paris, a huge crowd and a complicated layout of the gallery make it episodic. Organized in Washington by the National Gallery Kimberly A. Jones, the exhibition follows both the approximate chronology of Degass's fascination with Opra for decades, from his first portrait of Fiocre to the works that he called orgies of color, realized late in life. These vibrant pastel orgies, some of which were quite large, included the superb Dancer With Bouquets, in which two bouquets sunk at her feet looked like red eyes, staring at the bottom of her tutu.

The exhibition also covers the basic typology of Degass theatrical paintings, from those inspired by particular works, including the first great opera by Giacomo Meyerbeers Robert le Diable, to paintings of imagined dance rehearsals, to paintings elongated rectangles and the images he painted on fans. A final gallery dedicates the space necessary for the lives of dancers, many of whom were young impoverished women exploited by wealthy elderly men with predatory access behind the scenes. The beloved Little Dancer Aged Fourteen of the National Gallery, a wax sculpture of an artist named Marie van Goethem (whose life was commemorated in a 2014 musical), stands near the end of the exhibition, its provocative three-dimensionality giving voice to the two anonymous. dimensional dancers seen in paintings earlier in the exhibition.

Some of these works have become so familiar that they have been reclassified in the imagination of the public, now considered to be pretty rather than strange. But if you look at them long enough, their strangeness begins to overwhelm their beauty, as in the late pastel of a dancer with these two red bouquets, which look less like tributes paid by passionate fans than threatening eyes. In other images, the bodies are truncated, only the legs appear under the partially raised theater curtain, or merged, as in the drawings in which the dancers seem to share or miss legs.

Degass' fascination with ballet was partly a fascination for the twisted body, legs on hips, feet going in opposite directions and knees apart. The poses of dynamic beauty in ballet often seem bizarre when frozen in a photograph or a painting, and Degas was clearly drawn to the visual possibilities of taking them out of context. The familiar and the defamiliar is a recurring theme, and derived essentially from the theater, a safe space where one expects to see strange and foreign things.

Degas may also have turned to the theater to brush up on other genres, including history painting and landscape. The theater, in particular the technologically sophisticated Paris Opra, offered aspects of both heightened moments of great dramatic conflicts and sumptuous visions of the landscape in its decor and stage effects. By painting the theater, Degas could rejuvenate both the history painting, which he had aspired to master as a young painter, and the landscape, which he was fashionable enough to hold in slight disdain.

These are mainly formal questions, on visual choices and Degass' relationship to painting. A collection of disparate works, shapes and materials suggests a deeper psychological drama. In several images, including paintings, prints and pastels, we see the top of the distinctly curved scroll of the string bass protruding disruptively into the image. It was a common sight for those who were seated at the level of the Salle Peletier orchestra, the opera which preceded the Palais Garnier and the site of many Degass theater paintings, even if It had burned years earlier.

But the stringed bass is also the lowest of the stringed instruments of orchestras and carries sonic associations of masculinity. Its intrusion into the world of women dancing or singing is therefore an imposition of men in a female show. These wooden peaks are seen at an angle, which is how they would be seen in real life, but that angle exactly mimics the strange angle at which Degas has sometimes painted male customers of Opra, disturbing figures in black who lean to one side against nature against one side.

During the early years of the great opera in Paris, the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer published and developed a book called The world as will and representation, which may help explain Degass' ambition in these strange works. Schopenhauer used the tonal range of music as a metaphor for the whole of existence. The lowest notes represent the grossest mass of inorganic nature, while the above melodies speak of the intellectually enlightened will. Thus, the rollers of the lowest instruments burst into the realm of ideas, articulated nature and women too.

If there is some confusion in these overlapping ideas and metaphors (high and low, inorganic and organic, men and women), it is a confusion that may have been deeply felt by Degas. In 1856, when he was about 22 years old, Degas recorded in a notebook a disturbing and enigmatic episode in which he loved a woman, she pushed him away and he responded in a way that suggests that he did something shameful to a helpless girl. In the pictures he made later in life, the string bass is on the ground, with a ballerina walking on it, which would never happen, but is a vivid indication of Degass's guilt or a woman's revenge.

All this must therefore be true: that Degas was, like the men around him, a voyeur who made women objects; that he was perhaps ashamed of his relationship with women; that he found in the theater a metaphor for the whole field of existence, including the relationship between the sexes; that he knew this metaphor was deeply problematic even if he found it beautiful; and that painting opera and ballet allowed him to represent this foment and this confusion without solving it.

Yes, the Paris Opra was a machine, but for Degas it was also a mirror on nature and on itself.

Degas at the Opra Until July 5 at the National Gallery of Art. nga.gov.