Was Degas The Transformer Of Modern Dance?

“The importance of photography for Degas, a decades-old theme in scholarship about the artist, pops up again here. So, more surprisingly, does the prospect of Degas as an unwitting forefather of experimental dance of the 1960s and `70s. Degas, a political reactionary, certainly would have disavowed any such kinship. But his dance pictures foreshadow the way the work of Yvonne Rainer, the young Twyla Tharp, and their New York contemporaries would blend formal and informal movement almost a century later.”