Music & Performance

Performance has been painted for as long as painting has recorded human ritual. In the tomb-chapel of Nebamun (c. 1350 BCE, now in the British Museum), Egyptian artists depicted nude dancers and musicians at a banquet, breaking from strict convention by showing several musicians' faces frontally to convey liveliness — an unusually naturalistic touch within formal Egyptian art. Music-making resurfaces as a marker of refined domestic life in the Dutch Golden Age: Johannes Vermeer's The Music Lesson (c. 1662-65, Royal Collection) and The Concert (c. 1664, stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990 and still missing) use instruments and duets to stage quiet dramas of courtship and social accomplishment. The 19th century, however, made performance itself the central subject rather than a backdrop. Edgar Degas, who began painting dancers in the 1860s and was dubbed by critics 'the painter of dancers' by the 1880s, obsessively studied ballet in works like The Dance Class (1874) and the sculpture Little Dancer of Fourteen Years (begun c. 1880), which shocked its first viewers with an unidealized, working-class model rather than a graceful ballerina. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec pushed performance into the nightlife of Montmartre, capturing the cabaret in At the Moulin Rouge (1892-95), painting dancers and entertainers with a reporter's unsentimental eye. Across four millennia the theme keeps returning to the same tension: performance as spectacle for an audience, and performance as grueling, embodied labor behind the curtain.