A Day in Denver - Visiting the Edgar Degas exhibit at the Denver Art Museum

Degas masterpieces bring to mind my years spent in ballet classes as a child. My grandmother Jeanne, Granje to my sister and me, gave me a gorgeous canvas zipper bag one year, likely to carry my ballet supplies in, and the design is one of Degas' dancers.

I still have this bag, even though it's a tiny bit worse for wear. The zipper had problems for many years and then my sweet mother figured out how to fix it, so I can actually use it again. I think it must be at least 20 years old by now, maybe closer to 25 years old.

So when I heard that a Degas exhibit was coming to Denver, you can imagine my ecstasy!

Caitlin and I bought tickets to the exhibit for today and as our parents headed out of town with their travel trailer for a long weekend, we headed up to Denver to experience some artwork!

I confess, the exhibition is rather small if you're accustomed to large museums. But Denver is not New York City so we're pretty much thankful for any opportunities we have to experience culture. 

The exhibit was charming.

It covered Degas' progression in both style and medium throughout his life. He spent time on portraits and landscapes in his youth, then the nude form (both male and female) before progressing through a period of derby horses and their movements and the lines of their bodies, before finally landing on the nude female form, usually bathing and/or drying themselves.

Ballet dancers were last and Caitlin and I are both in agreement that, for us anyway, his finest representation of the ballet dancer are in his charcoal drawings. They were stunning and I could have stared at them for hours.

Like I said, the exhibit presented a smattering of his work throughout his years.

We learned that he truly did work in a variety of mediums, sometimes blending them into a single piece of art. He also worked in monotypes that produced haunting dark landscapes that I personally had never seen before.

For me, I consider his finest work to have been done in his later years. His early work wasn't iconic enough and you see very little of the later Degas in the portraits and landscapes he created as a younger man.

But that's okay.

It reminded me that we're all going somewhere and who we were before doesn't mean we can't mature and grow into something amazing and different.

Needless to say, Caitlin and I loved the exhibit. She came away with scads of postcards for her collection and I have an enchanting ballet dancer poster to hang in my work cubicle. I know just where I'll put it.

I can mark Degas off my bucket list, although I would love to see even more of his work someday, particularly the ballet dancer paintings in pastels that I love so very much. Now to hope for an opportunity to see Monet's work. I'm quite a fan of the impressionists as you might guess!