Bowing Dancer 1885

This pastel drawing, Bowing Dancer, is by Edgar Degas. It captures a ballerina at rest, her form delineated by soft, smudged strokes. The colour palette is muted, dominated by pastel blues, greens and pinks that create a sense of dreamy transience. Degas uses line and colour to create a spatial tension that plays with our perception. The dancer's tutu appears almost as an abstract form, with subtle gradations suggesting volume and movement. Her arm leads our eye downwards, while the background, rendered with loose hatching, seems to press forward. This flattening of space and emphasis on surface anticipates later modernist strategies. The semiotic interplay of the dancer's posture, costume, and the artist's technique destabilizes traditional representations of ballet, instead focusing on a fleeting, subjective experience. The artist's expressive handling of pastel, with its erasures and reworkings, underscores the process of making. This formal quality aligns with the broader artistic discourse questioning the nature of representation itself.