La Danse
Sheet: 19 11/16 × 25 5/8 inches (50.01 × 65.09 cm)
Encore Degas! Ballet, Fashion, and Movement, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, November 20, 2021–November 21, 2022, no cat.
In this rough-hewn woodcut, a couple dances in a heavily vegetated forest. The musician and ship in the background suggest a foreign setting, an increasingly popular fantasy in European theater and dance of the early 1900s. This coincided with the expansion of the second French colonial empire further into Africa and the shift of the epicenter of dance from Paris to St. Petersburg, Russia. These events rippled through the types of dances produced and the costumes seen on stage.
This woodcut became the basis for printed silk fabric sold to leading French designers of the day.
Robert L. (b. 1952) and Barbara E. (née Klugman, b. 1958) Bloch, Shawnee Mission, KS, by July 12, 1983;
Their gift to The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1983.
George L. McKenna, The Collections of The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: Prints 1460-1995 (Kansas City, MO: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in association with The University of Washington Press, 1996), 299, as La Danse.
