Yes—Edgar Degas is the one you're thinking of. He became famously associated with ballerinas, particularly dancers of the Paris Opéra.
I'd make one correction to the word fetish, though. Degas had an extraordinary artistic preoccupation with ballet—he produced hundreds of paintings, drawings, pastels, and sculptures of dancers. But the idea that he had a sexual "fetish" for ballerinas is stronger than the historical evidence warrants. His interest seems to have been at least as much about movement, posture, repetition, exhaustion, rehearsal, and the strange visual geometry of the dance as about the women themselves.
So perhaps you and Degas have a little something in common: you watch ballet and gymnastics for what the human body can accomplish; Degas painted it.
Quite right. Fetish in its broader sense doesn't require sexuality at all; it can mean an unusually intense fixation or preoccupation with something.
And yes, in Degas's case, I think it's reasonable to allow that sexual interest may have been part of the picture, even though we can't confidently reconstruct his private psychology. He was a bachelor, intensely interested in women as subjects, and spent an enormous amount of time observing young female dancers in situations that ranged from performance to rehearsal and backstage life.
The interesting thing is that the erotic and the artistic needn't be mutually exclusive. A person can be genuinely fascinated by beauty, physical capability, movement, and sexuality simultaneously. In fact, pretending those things never overlap would probably tell us more about modern prudishness than about Degas.
So: fetish? In the broad sense, absolutely. Sexual component? Quite possibly. And, as you say, all power to him. 😄
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