Analysis Of Doeschate-Chu's Interpretation Of The Dancer

Edgar Degas was known, in his time and in ours, as the painter of dancers. What his choice of subject matter says about the artist, or reveals about the political and social climate of the time, is open to interpretation. Eunice Lipton’s piece, At the Ballet: The Disintegration of Glamour, from her book: Looking into Degas; Uneasy Images of Women and Modern Life, focuses on the highly controversial side of ballet, in relation to the way in which Degas chose to depict the dancers. Petra ten Doeschate-Chu’s observation, Impressionism and the Urban Scene: Edgar Degas, which is an excerpt from Nineteenth Century European Art, is a brief analysis of Degas’s artistic style, with concentration on the compositional innovations of the artist…THESIS

This again, is not a radical interpretation of his art, as it is simple an observation, and would not have garnered any attention for any radical ideas. But this particular topic has an interesting link to Lipton’s work. A review in the Oxford Journals praised Lipton for moving away from the the commonplace interpretations of art based on “formal innovation and 'neutral' subject matter” which served only to examine the “interesting compositional perspectives and technical virtuosity” of the artist (cite). Doeschate-Chu’s work however was published much later than Lipton’s, yet we see continued use of the neural method of interpretation and representation of historical information in art, despite the obvious merits of historical examinations like Lipton’s. While intentional neutrality allows the onlooker to formulate their conclusions based on its visual components, it is problematically general, and the omission of key facts may in the end be highly misleading, causing the viewer to make conclusion without all the