The images of dance

The Portland Art Museum is generally seen as a large, yet small-town museum with an excellent local collection. But the museum has also hosted a series of traveling sideshows, which lend to its “internationally recognized” status.

Take, for example, The Quest for Immortality, which brought a giant poster of a golden Egyptian sarcophagus to the Park Blocks for the whole of last winter. Or last summer, Rembrandt and the Golden Age of Dutch Art was advertised with the slogan “Experience a World of Genius,” which, at the very least, is of questionable grammar.

PAM’s newest exhibition, The Dancer, has a similar air. Advertised as part of a partnership between the museum and Oregon Ballet Theatre, which is showing a series of French ballets this month, the theme seems to be not so much about Impressionist drawings or the rapidly changing pop culture scene in fin-de-si퀌�cle France, but the singular topic “dance.” It’s as though one could walk into the exhibit having never heard of such a thing before, and leave with a comprehensive review.

For all its hoopla, including timed entry and extra admission costs, the exhibit is a fascinating and remarkably pointed view of the backstage dealings between young dancers, their mothers and the wealthy theater patrons who had access to the rehearsal studios and dressing rooms.

Curated locally by Annette Dixon, PAM’s curator of Prints and Drawings, the majority of the works on display are not the most well-known Impressionist pieces prevalent on thank-you notes and calendars, but little-traveled pastels and studies that reveal more about the relationships between the observed and the artists than the large-scale, more self-conscious works.

Scenes like Jean-Louis Forain’s “Negotiations in the Wings” illustrate this point. The piece, a quick watercolor sketch of a dancer’s mother leaning so far over into the lap of a wealthy ballet subscriber that she touches his thigh while her young daughter adjusts her tight bun in the mirror behind them, totally oblivious to the fact that she is being sold to a sugar daddy, make the rest of the pictures suddenly appear allusive. The images demand a closer insight into what seems like a familiar study of sinuous young women.

In Edgar Degas’ “Study of Two Dancers,” the women look completely exhausted, and one holds her head in her hands, barely able to stay awake. A more formalized work by Forain, “Dancer in Her Dressing Room,” shows a slender, tired dancer leaning into the dim lamplight of her dresser to tie the ribbons of her ballet slippers, while her mother, perhaps dressed in mourning, writes at a desk behind her, begging the questions: Is she a widow? Is she balancing her accounts? Does her daughter’s dancing provide enough income for the two of them?

While the three artists, each with their own focus, provide a complete glimpse into a time when lesbians danced together in bars and aristocrats mingled gingerly with capitalists, it’s the work of Forain that stands out. An illustrator and cartoonist hugely influential on the Social Realist style, Forain provides a more accurate insight into the changing nature of culture at the foot of the 1900s, as he is the only celebrated artist of the three who actually had to work for a living.

The Dancer at the Portland Art Museum

1219 S.W. Park Ave.Through May 11$15 for adults or $13 for studentsFor additional information, visit www.pam.org.