Three Dancers, Blue Skirts, Red Blouses 1903

Edgar Degas made this pastel drawing of dancers sometime in his career, with a flurry of marks and a subdued, earthy palette punctuated by bold reds and blues. I imagine Degas coming at this image again and again, trying to find the weight of the dancers, trying to find their movement. You get the feeling that he knew these dancers, that he empathized with them, and that he was thinking about something about the body and how it moves in space. The texture of the pastel gives a soft, almost blurred effect, and he's really focused on the way light hits the skirts and blouses. There's this one stroke of white pastel on the back of the dancer to the right—it just sings! Degas spent so much time with dancers, and you see this echoed in painters like Manet and Toulouse-Lautrec, and even forward to Alice Neel. Artists constantly explore the human form in movement, inspiring each other across time. It's like a conversation, each artist adding their own perspective to the ongoing dialogue.