1876-1953

The city, with its inexhaustible variety of human types and activities, held a fascination for Everett Shinn throughout his artistic career. He loved its life at night: the theater dance halls, the lights, the orchestra pit, and the interior and exterior architecture of the theater itself. Combinations of these motifs appear again and again in his paintings after 1900, the year he returned from a trip taken to France and England with his first wife Florence Scovel.

While still abroad, he had exhibited some of the pastels he created previously in New York at Goupil’s in Paris, the same gallery in which Degas had shown pastels of nudes in 1885 and 1893. However, other than the notes on his own exhibit, made in his autobiographical notebooks, there are no other documents of his 1900 trip. Shinn’s record of it seems to have been entirely in the form of recollection. The paintings he would later create indicate that the works of Edgar Degas, and that great artist’s infatuation with the ballet, had made a lasting impression on him.

Shinn’s incredible memory enabled him to recreate a scene or an event in detail on paper long after it had actually happened. This method allowed him to render images from his European trip during the years that followed. Influenced by his memories of Europe, it was upon his return to New York that Shinn changed his subject matter, from the drama of the urban working class to the theater and ballet.

The Yellow Dancer of 1911 is a work of this latter genre. It depicts a lone ballerina taking her bow at the end of a performance and the entire image has been captured with a sense of immediacy. The viewer perceives the scene from the intimate position of the left wing of the stage. From this angle, we see a side view of the ballerina, her tutu rendered with spontaneous quivering strokes of white and yellow that shimmer with light. She gracefully bends to the audience and to the orchestra conductor. Shinn conveys the dramatic impact of the figure alone on the stage by positioning her against a diagonal sweep of stage, painted in a brilliant green that divides the composition in half. The stage is banded on its front apron by a curvilinear swoop of yellow that represents footlights. The ballerina, the stage, and its abutting architectural column, are all bathed in a glowing luminosity.

The light is strongly contrasted with the dark interior of the theater which surrounds the audience and the musicians. In deep tones of browns and blacks, highlighted with streaks of reds and muted whites, Shinn describes the audience in the orchestra and in the boxes with limited detail, creating more of an impression than a literal view. He presents the architectural elements of a column, the curved boxes, and their heavy draperies in greater detail.

Shinn’s gestural application of pastel is related to the technique that European artists had evolved. First the paper was soaked and mounted on a heavy board. Then large patches of color were applied with pastels to form a chromatic composition. The colors lost their original tones when the pastel substance became wet and changed into dark shades. As the picture dried, the original color would return. However, the natural chalky quality of the pastel had changed. The pigment dried into a hard surface that resembled the finish of tempera, which then enabled Shinn to work in additional layers of color. Great care was given to the application of a special fixative in order to preserve the luminosity of the color. This innovative technique of working with pastels is one of the reasons that Shinn has often been compared to Degas.

In November/December 1906 issue of Studio Talk, A.E. Gallatin wrote the following regarding Shinn’s technique in pastels:

Shinn is a master of the pastel; he knows thoroughly both the possibilities and the limitations of his medium. The material is never strained in endeavoring to get too much out of it; and if technically his pastels are great achievements, pictorially they are also [great].

The period from 1900 through 1911 was a time of great productivity for Shinn. His interest in the theater was revealed in his art, and works depicting actors and dancers on stage were prominently featured in the many exhibitions in which he participated. His paintings, pastels and drawings were shown at such prestigious art galleries as Boussod, Valadon; Kraushaar Galleries, M. Knoedler and Company, and Durand-Ruel Galleries, and institutions such as the Chicago Art Institute, the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington DC. Shinn’s exhibition record with dealers during the first part of the century is extraordinary; few dealers in America would have dared to take a chance on a then unknown artist.

During the year 1911 alone, the same year that he created The Yellow Dancer, Shinn was represented in major exhibitions at the Folsom Galleries, New York; Columbus Museum, Columbus, Ohio; International Exhibition, Rome, Italy; Colony Club, New York; and a one person exhibition at the Union League Club, New York. Although there are no written records on these presentations, it is quite possible that The Yellow Dancer appeared in one of them.

As a parallel, it is interesting to note that a number of Degas’s pastels on the ballet include the same diagonal compositional division that is so dominant in Shinn’s The Yellow Dancer. Similarly, limited detail and spontaneous gestural handling are evident in Degas’s pastels, The Green Dancer, circa 1880 (Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection); At the Ballet, circa 1880-1881 (Private Collection); Three Dancers in Front of a Landscape Background, circa 1895-1898 (Private Collection); and Ballet (The Star) (Musée d’Orsay, Paris).

As an added note, of the group knowns as the French Impressionists, Degas was the only one who was interested in the artificial life of the theater. Of the American group known as the Eight, Shinn was similarly the only one who was seduced by the lure of the theater and maintained this imagery in his art throughout his career. Some of Shinn’s theater paintings are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art (Revue, 1908); Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York (Theater Box); Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute (Paris Cabaret); Westmoreland County Museum of Art, Greensburg, Pennsylvania (The Green Ballet); and Delaware Art Museum (Backstage Scene).

The Yellow Dancer reflects the new spirit of Realism which was formulated by the Eight in the early Twentieth Century. Its fresh lyrical vision has been accomplished with truly consummate technical skill.

Constance Schwartz