Edgar Degas’ paintings of the ballet are amongst the most popular works of art in the world, any of them easy on the eye and superficially glamorous. And yet at the time he was painting, many of these pictures were considered outrageous and dangerous.
This 60 minute film draws on much of the painstaking research done by Richard Kendall and Jill de Vonyar, the two curators of an exceptional exhibition that took place in United States in October 2002.
The film makes use of unprecedented access to the building and the archives of the Palais Garnier – the home of the Opéra de Paris, opened in 1875 when Degas was in his 30’s and where he spent much of his time for the next ten or twenty years.