Dale Harris, in Degas9Ã? Da~cms Ballet News (Nov. 1984), 1865 Broadway,
New York, N.Y. 10023.
The "ballet boom" of recent years has made Edgar Degas's (1834-1917) paintings of ballerinas as familiar as the Mona Lisa and Whistler's Mother. But neither ballet nor the art of Degas was always viewed so fa- vorably, recalls Harris, who teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.
In Degas's late-19th-century Paris, ballerinas stood barely a cut above dance-hall girls in the social pecking order....