Sculpture
Degas's only showing of sculpture during his life took place in 1881 when he exhibited The Little Fourteen Year Old Dancer, only shown again in 1920; the rest of the sculptural works remained private until a posthumous exhibition in 1918. Degas scholars have agreed that the sculptures were not created as aids to painting, although the artist habitually explored ways of linking graphic art and oil painting, drawing and pastel, sculpture and photography. Degas assigned the same significance to sculpture as to drawing: "Drawing is a way of thinking, modelling another".
After Degas's death, his heirs found in his studio 150 wax sculptures, many in disrepair. They consulted foundry owner Adrien Hébrard, who concluded that 74 of the waxes could be cast in bronze. It is assumed that, except for the Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, all Degas bronzes worldwide are cast from surmoulages (i.e., cast from bronze masters). A surmoulage bronze is a bit smaller, and shows less surface detail, than its original bronze mold. The Hébrard Foundry cast the bronzes from 1919–1936, and closed down in 1937, shortly before Hébrard's death.
In 2004, a previously unknown cache of 73 plaster casts created from wax originals sculpted by Degas was discovered. Although not previously catalogued, the casts were consistent with the 73 originals that Degas’s heirs gave to Hébrard Foundry in 1918. Art scholars are not in agreement as to what these casts actually are. It appears, from their condition and provenance, that no bronzes were ever cast from these 73 plasters.
Read more about this topic: Edgar Degas
Famous quotes containing the word sculpture:
“What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to an human soul.”
—Joseph Addison (1672–1719)
“You should go to picture-galleries and museums of sculpture to be acted upon, and not to express or try to form your own perfectly futile opinion. It makes no difference to you or the world what you may think of any work of art. That is not the question; the point is how it affects you. The picture is the judge of your capacity, not you of its excellence; the world has long ago passed its judgment upon it, and now it is for the work to estimate you.”
—Anna C. Brackett (1836–1911)
“There are men whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and the remains of the earliest Greek art.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)