Performing Arts

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Performers offered artists bodies in motion, heightened emotion and the glamour of artificial light. Antoine Watteau's Pierrot (c. 1718–19) presents a commedia dell'arte clown standing stiff and moon-faced in white, and William Hogarth painted a scene from John Gay's hit The Beggar's Opera in the late 1720s, with the audience on stage included. Edgar Degas spent decades in the rehearsal rooms and wings of the Paris Opéra; The Dance Class (1874) shows young dancers waiting, stretching and fidgeting as much as dancing. Georges Seurat's The Circus (1891) turns a ring performance into rising, energetic lines.

Artists also worked for the stage. Natalia Goncharova designed folk-bright sets and costumes for the Ballets Russes production Le Coq d'Or (1914), and Robert Rauschenberg made sets, costumes and lighting for Merce Cunningham's company from the 1950s. In Japan, Natori Shunsen's woodblock portraits of the 1920s renewed the long tradition of the actor print.