Degas at the Races: Sculpture
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Dressed Ballet Dancer (Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans), 1880/1882, cast c. 1920-1923, plaster cast, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon |
Degas' use of mixed media is epitomized by the only sculpture he ever exhibited: Dressed Ballet Dancer, which was in the Sixth Impressionist Exhibition of 1881. Degas was supposed to display the sculpture in the 1880 Paris Salon, the official exhibition of the French arts establishment, but feeling that it wasn't ready, he exhibited only the empty glass case he had made. It was a fascinating way for Degas to build anticipation for his work.
When the Dancer was shown the following year, it received mixed reviews. The majority of critics disliked the piece. They thought it was ugly, that it looked like a museum specimen, in part because Degas exhibited it inside a case. Some considered the head and face grotesque, and they compared her to a little monkey. Degas was thought to have called his dancers the "little rats of the opera." But this girl--who was actually a young dance student named Marie van Goethem--looks like a typical early adolescent, with her protruding belly, flat chest, and practiced ballet pose.
In addition to its forthright portrayal of a youthful body type, Degas' use of mixed media also rocked the art world at the time. Having modeled her in fleshlike tinted wax, Degas gave the Dancer a real cloth skirt, a real silk bodice, a wig of real hair with a green ribbon tied around its long braid, and pink ballet slippers. On one of his many drawings of Marie, Degas had written the address of a dollmaker and dressmaker where he probably purchased the hair and the tiny slippers.
To understand public reaction to this work, it helps to be aware of the debate in artistic circles at the end of the nineteenth century concerning polychrome versus monochrome sculpture. People were used to dark bronzes and white marbles. Degas' wax tinting and his addition of other colorful, nontraditional elements such as the dancer's net skirt, hair, and satin bodice and shoes, presented an array of textures and surface finishes that took people by surprise and would later influence the modern sculpture of cubists, surrealists, and later twentieth-century artists. Despite dissenting opinions on Degas' brash young figure, however, there were also critics who praised the Dancer as the epitome of authenticity.
The largest and most famous of Degas' wax sculpture, Dressed Ballet Dancer was first cast in plaster before it was cast in bronze. The National Gallery is fortunate to have received the plaster as well as a promised gift of the wax. It is believed that plasters were made from the wax in this instance only, possibly because the figure was so large and required a number of mold sections. The plaster was painted faithfully to reproduce the coloration (patina) of the wax, thereby providing the Hébrard Foundry a good record of the sculpture's surface finish to work from when the bronzes were patinated and dressed the same way as the wax sculpture.
Degas' Dancer became one of the most beloved works of sculpture in the history of Western art. Like the wax horses, it is a result of the high degree of technical and artistic experimentation that the modernist Degas employed throughout his career. His innovative strategies to capture the essence of attitude, stance, movement, gesture, and consciousness--a realm beyond realism of appearance--lie at the heart of his contribution to art.
