Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement, Royal Academy of Arts, London

"This landmark exhibition focuses on Edgar Degas’s preoccupation with movement as an artist of the dance. Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement traces the development of the artist's ballet imagery throughout his career, from the documentary mode of the early 1870s to the sensuous expressiveness of his final years. 

The exhibition is the first to present Degas’s progressive engagement with the figure in movement in the context of parallel advances in photography and early film; indeed, the artist was keenly aware of these technological developments and often directly involved with them." 

source: http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibitions/degas/

Degas - Composition

 At the Milliner's, Degas, Pastel, c. 1882

In this daring nuanced composition about modern life—the subject is the fleeting encounter rather than the women themselves—Degas heeded the advice of the critic Edmond Duranty, who, in his 1876 pamphlet, The New Painting—about the art that came to be known as Impressionism—wrote: "Let us take leave of the stylized human body, which is treated like a vase. What we need is the characteristic modern person in his clothes, in the midst of his social surroundings, at home or out in the street." - excerpted from MoMA Highlights, 1999, p 42.

Link Full text and image with zoom, MoMa