Degas’ Bronzes: Horses, Dancers and Sculpture

The dispersal of a group of posthumous bronzes recounts the artist’s quest for movement in a few rare pieces.

Paul Valéry was perhaps the first to see the analogy between Edgar Degas‘s horse and dancer motifs. In his book Degas, danse, dessin, published in 1937, twenty years after the artist’s death, the poet looks back on their friendship, his memories and, above all, is able to take a comprehensive look at his artistic production, much of which was revealed posthumously. At the start of the chapter “Cheval, danse et photo”, Valéry writes: “ It has four hooves. No animal carries the primary ballerina, the star of the ballet company, like a thoroughbred in perfect balance, which the hand of the one who rides the horse seems to be suspended, and which moves forward with a small step in full sunlight.” Degas was interested in horses long before he had access to the backstage of the Paris Opera in 1870. His childhood friend Paul Valpinçon invited Degas with open arms to his family’s property in the Orne region of France, the land of stud farms. He went there regularly and, far from his image as a Parisian painter and worldly artist—which he cultivated—he drew landscapes and horses. He attended the races, observing the horses’ movement—walking, trotting and galloping, without neglecting the impression of speed that could emanate from each movement. Degas is said to have begun sculpting in 1867, after his painting Scène de steeple-chase (Steeple-Chase Scene) received a scathing reception at the Salon the previous year. The testimony of Thiébault-Sisson, who spoke with the artist, is eloquent.

Modeling as Documentation

Piqued by criticism of his ability to draw and represent a horse, Degas sought to understand through modeling what he had not been able to convey through the study of myology and anatomy. Degas rejected the idea of being a sculptor, instead integrating the technique into his painting, in the same way as drawing, from which he then created volume. It’s for my own satisfaction alone that I’ve modeled animals and people in wax, not to take my mind off painting or drawing, but to give my paintings, my drawings, more expression, more ardor and more life,” Degas declared. Considering his models as documentation, using poor materials, mixing tallow with wax, using a little plasticine, he didn’t contemplate the idea of selling them. With age, however, his sculptural practice shifted, and as he lost his eyesight in the 1890s, he devoted all his energies to it, especially as he could no longer draw. On his death, the number of sculptures raised questions for his heirs, his brother René and his sister’s daughter, Jeanne Fèvre. Should these works be destroyed, as the artist once envisaged? Or should they be preserved and their recognition encouraged? Didn’t the sculptor and lifelong friend of Degas, Albert Bartholomé, succeed in convincing him to have plaster casts made for three of his modelages? Hadn’t the man who consolidated La Petite Danseuse de quatorze ans—the only sculpture shown to the public during his lifetime—the day before his exhibition, already changed his opinion of the work? Degas himself had sown the seeds of doubt, through his correspondence with Bartholomé, “his dear friend and perhaps foundryman”. Of the more than 150 wax, terracotta and plaster models scattered around the studio and apartment, some in very poor condition, only 74 have survived, including fifteen depicting horses. Following the inventory, and after much discussion, it was decided to entrust the casting to Adrien Hébrard, under the direction of chief founder Albino Palozzolo. Each of the waxes were made into 22 proofs, of which only 20 were sold (the other two being destined for the founder and the heirs), bearing a letter from A to T. The bronzes schedule to be sold at Drouot on November 22 are derived from castings made between 1921 and 1931 from the original waxes. Listed in the Rewald and Millard catalogs, the latter are surprisingly vague in their dating. For example, the group of Cheval au galop tournant la tête à droite, les pieds ne touchant pas le sol and Jockey monté sur le cheval (Galloping Horse Turning its Head to the Right, with its Hooves not Touching the Ground and Jockey Riding the Horse) (€100,000/150,000) is dated by the former between 1865 and 1881 and by the latter between 1881 and 1890. Degas never dated his wax models, but the two experts rely as much on the comparative analysis of the drawings and paintings as on the artist’s own statements. The artist’s perfectionism led him to constantly rework his figures, even if it meant destroying them each night, as Vollard testifies, astonished when Degas told him he would soon have finished one of his dancers and would be ready to send it to the caster. The definitive nature of bronze, which Degas liked to joke about, frightened him.

Degas’ Relationship with Photography

Degas’ sculptures have often been seen as influenced by the chronophotography of Muybridge or Marey, but this could be an a posteriori reconstruction, as Mariel Oberthür reminds us in Edgar Degas en Normandie: le peintre du cheval et des courses. With numerous examples, she shows how Degas began working on horse movement much earlier, by looking at other painters like Meissonier, and above all by experimenting on his own. In fact, while Degas was aware of photographic work on movement in the 1890s, he was also critical of it. The sharpness offered by the camera’s decomposition of movement had a kind of frozen quality. How to capture the sensation of speed? The way Degas included the question of movement in his paintings and sculptures had to do with touch and gesture. For him, three-dimensionality was all about conveying the sensation of life. Modeling, he believes, does not tolerate improvisation and demands more precision than drawing. You can almost feel which muscle is resting and which is active, for example in Cheval à l’abreuvoir (Horse at the Trough) (€60,000/80,000). While it is not lacking life, it is less spectacular than a horse in full race. Degas sensitivity to play of tension when he observed a horse is the same as that which the same treatment he gives to dancers. It’s not necessarily the moment of jumping, but the moment when the animal prepares to jump. It’s not necessarily the performance itself, but the warm-up or the curtain call, as we see with Danseuse saluant autrefois appelée Première étude (Dancer Taking a Bow, formerly called First Study) (€40,000/60,000). The spirit of follow-through should not be overlooked when looking at Degas’ sculptures and, according to Mariel Oberthür, one should not separate walking from trotting or galloping in this marvelous treatise on mechanics. Transposed to the world of dance, this observation is just as accurate. In the 1890s, dance was also broken down by chronophotography, notably in the work La Danse grecque Antique d’après les monuments (Ancient Greek Dance from Monuments and Sculptors ) and sculptors like Camille Claudel took up the theme and made use of these new processes. Degas was in tune with the zeitgeist, but unlike his paintings, in which the dancers are clothed and the tulle gives rise to a striking play of colors, his sculptures are almost all modeled skin-on, naked. The scandal surrounding the exhibition of the fourteen-year-old Petite Danseuse, then wearing a tutu superimposed on the modeled flesh, calls into question the crudeness of the technique and its realism. La Danseuse s’avançant les bras levés, première étude (The Dancer with Arms Raised, First Study) (€50,000/80,000), on the other hand, takes us back to the ritual of the dance spectacle, and depicts a momentum, the very movement that Degas always sought to translate.

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