Piffle Pieces: Camargo in D.C.,"Giselle" in Phoenix, and dance criticism in America

The National Gallery has moved Camargo again. They are renovating the 18th century French rooms, and Nicolas Lancret's beautiful little painting, La Camargo Dancing, has been moved down to the back corner of the farthest room on the ground floor. I take my students there to see her every autumn, when we study early 18th century French ballet history, and it took us some time to find her. Pre-Revolutionary French painters such as Lancret and Fragonard are out of fashion now (too pretty, too pastel), but, out of fashion or not, La Camargo is still there, dancing at a party, the beautiful ankles daringly exposed, the feet, in their heeled shoes, twinkling. Walking through the Gallery, I couldn't help but notice how many paintings there might be considered unfashionable if one considered only their subject matter: paintings of minor Greek or Roman myths, of dukes and knights and dragons, of pampered women and children and their little dogs. Not what one would see at the mall or on TV, but there they are, masterpieces of the past, looking the viewer square in the eye, as if they were important. Not once did the students (aged 16 to 18) grouse that they were having to look at old paintings, or ask where was something new and now that spoke to Them. Not once did they even seem momentarily bored. Instead, they were genuinely interested — beguiled, as millions of people have been before them, to see the humanity shining from those 500-year-old eyes, or how a particular painter was fascinated with light, and bent it to his will.