Edgar Degas Painting: The Dance Class

For my topic, I chose Edgar Degas’ painting, “The Dance Class,” or often referred to as, “The Ballet Class,” to discuss how his interpretation of ballet aspects are de-romanticized despite its era of late romanticism. This topic is of interest to me because I have an appreciation for ballet as an art form. For almost all of my life, I have noticed that media and society have hyper-exaggerated the obsession with sexually objectifying ballerinas. This, in turn, has undermined the true beauty of ballet, in which Degas’ painting serves as one of the early anchors to portraying the innocence and delicacy of the art form.

Edgar Degas sets the groundwork for de-romanticizing the sexual objectification of female ballerinas through his painting, “The
To sexually objectify a woman is to emphasize her body as a physical object of male sexual desire (Szymanski, Moffitt, and Carr). In movies, posters, and many other forms of media, ballerinas are depicted as fragile interpreters of emotion, music, or story. They are almost always notorious for their svelte figures and flawless execution at the precision of the pointe (which is the classic, “tip-of-the-toes” stance we are all so familiar of). They are beautiful and look as though they are the very essence of fairy-tale brought into
Today, standards for ballerinas include those said svelte figures to tall heights; elongated arms and legs, as well as a strong physique dedicated to train the body to manipulate effortless grace. The proportions of the young women in this painting distort the notion of “tall and slender,” and instead portray petite, shorter figures. The elderly man can also aid in the visual distortion of proportions since he has a support staff. Elderly people are also, in most modern thought, believed to “shrink” in height as they age. He is significant in this painting, as well as to the concept of “sexual objectification” in that he does not gaze at his students for their appearances. He observes their physical forms as they are replicating the steps in the dance routine, as any dean or teacher should, to make sure that they correctly capture the art in form. What this also generates is a sense of youthful nostalgia that captures the innocence of this piece altogether, from the composition, down to the details of the uniforms’ ornamentation. The dull strength of the oil paint pigmentation does not offer an aesthetically exciting look, adding a neutral sense of reality to the given time period. This captures the raw nature of ballet practice behind-the-scenes, something that today’s perception of ballet does not necessarily get exploited for