Edgar Degas

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Description

Edgar Degas
Préparation à la danse, le pied droit en avant
Stamped Degas (Lugt 658), numbered 57/i and with the foundry mark A.A. Hebrard cire perdue
Bronze, brown patina
Height: 22 1/8 in.
56.2cm

Provenance

Mr. Clark, New York, June 8, 1922
Joan Whitney Payson
Charles Shipman Payson
By descent to the present owner

Literature

John Rewald, Degas, Works in Sculpture: A Complete Catalogue, New York, 1944, pp. 25 and 103, no. XLVI, illustration of another cast pp. 130-31
Franco Russoli and Fiorella Minervino, L'Opera completa di Degas, Milan, 1970, no. S36, illustration of another cast p. 142
John Rewald, Degas’s Complete Sculpture, Catalogue Raisonné, San Francisco, 1990, no. XLVI, illustration of another cast p. 130
Anne Pingeot, Degas Sculptures, Paris, 1991, illustration of another cast pp. 44-5
Sara Campbell, “Degas’ Bronzes”, Apollo, London, August 1995, no. 57, illustration of another cast fig. 55
Joseph S. Czestochowski and Anne Pingeot, Degas Sculptures, Catalogue Raisonné of the Bronzes, Memphis, 2002, no. 57, illustration of another cast p. 232

Catalogue Note

Sculpting preoccupied Edgar Degas throughout his life. As Joseph Durand-Ruel recalled, “Whenever I called on Degas, I was almost as sure to find him modeling clay as painting” (quoted in Czestochowski and Pingeot, op. cit., p. 39). Nevertheless, this medium remained an intensely private area for the artist. Although at the time of his death some 150 wax statuettes were found in his studio, the only sculpture Degas ever exhibited in public was his famous Petite danseuse de quatorze ans (Campbell no. 71), exhibited at the Sixth Impressionist Exhibition in 1881.

Degas’ primary goal in sculpting was to explore movement and positions; therefore it is logical that almost all of his sculptures depicted dancers, bathers or horses. Dancers provided particularly appropriate subjects as they tirelessly struck successive poses, which in turn could be exaggerated by the artist, thereby allowing him to experiment with space and form. The present work remains faithful to Degas’ objectives, capturing a fleeting moment of grace as the dancer, head turned to the left, effortlessly draws her arms up and out while delicately extending her right leg. As Pierre-Auguste Renoir noted, with sculpture, “Degas found the means to express the malady of our contemporaries, I mean movement… That is Degas’s greatness: movement in a French style” (quoted in ibid., p. 72).