About this work
**Three Dancers (Blue Tutus, Red Bodices)** — Edgar Degas, c. 1903 Pastel on paper mounted on cardboard
What hits first is the colour — a collision of cobalt and crimson that feels almost confrontational. *Three Dancers (Blue Tutus, Red Bodices)* is a pastel on paper glued to cardboard , and it announces itself through the vibrant clash of its two dominant hues: the cool spread of blue tutus set electrically against red-corsaged bodices. Degas was not so much interested in the narrative of the actual dancing or the individual dancers; rather, his narrative lies in the explosive sensation of colour and the different structures he discovered in the surfaces. The three figures are clustered close, their forms pressing against one another in ways that flatten conventional depth. The dancers pose, but as figures they are absorbed by the intensity of the colours and by Degas's abstract technique, and the stage — or the audience — in the background has become a purely imaginative pastel landscape.
It is precisely the moment depicted in this scene, immediately before the dancer goes on stage, that quite possibly says more about the nature of dance than any image of its performance on stage.
*Three Dancers (Blue Tutus, Red Bodices)*, made around 1903, is one of two masterpieces in the permanent collection of the Fondation Beyeler, Switzerland, that clearly demonstrate the radicalism and modernity of Degas's late work. By this point in his career, Degas's eyesight had begun to fail, and he focused almost exclusively on dancers and nudes, increasingly turning to sculpture as his sight weakened. The late dancer pastels of this period mark a decisive break from his earlier work: the subject of the ballet, which Degas had pioneered in the 1870s, dominates these late works, but compared to his earlier work on the theme, they have been stripped of anecdotal interest — the focus no longer on behind-the-scenes specificities of dance production or its social context. What remained was pure formal investigation. In his later work, Degas explored the pastel crayon technique obsessively, putting many layers of colour on top of each other and varying his brush strokes to create effects that in many ways anticipate abstract art.
Highly saturated, synthetic colours, intensified through complementary hot-and-cold contrasts, are applied in insistently vertical and diagonal striations, working both to model forms and to erode the boundaries between dancers, costumes, and surrounds.
This is a work that rewards a particular kind of room and viewer. Its palette is too charged for a space that asks for calm — it belongs somewhere with ambition: a studio, a dining room, a reading corner lit by a single warm lamp.
