DEGAS: Musée des Beaux Arts, Tours.
Danseuse, Degas.
I find the bronze sculpture, ‘Danseuse’ on display in Tours Musée des Beaux Arts mysterious. Mysterious in the sense that it looks, well, to put it mildly, rough and ready, unfinished yet Degas (family name was de Gas) was a meticulous artist.
His world famous La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans (Little Dancer of Fourteen Years) wore a real bodice, tutu, ballet shoes, hair and ribbon. Degas, who fashioned her from wax, never had it cast in bronze. However, he did make a plaster cast from which the copies seen in museums and galleries were cast after his death.
Was it perhaps a preliminary working model, similar to a sketch for a painting?
Was ‘Danseuse’ intended to be cast?
Is it one of the many maquettes Degas produced at the end of his life when he was almost blind?
Is it one of his unfinished works in progress?
Of the one hundred and fifty wax sculptures found in his studio after Degas died, many were in such a bad condition, the Parisian foundry owner Adrien Hébrard decided that only half could be cast in bronze. Is this one of them? It certainly looks like a cast of melting wax.
The Little Dancer, Degas.
The Degas in Tours took me back to my schooldays. I first saw a copy of his Little Dancer in the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff. We were taken there to see The Gwendoline Davies Bequest of Impressionist Art and told to write an essay on two works.
Because I found them puzzling I chose The Little Dancer by Degas and Rain – Auvers by van GOGH. Knowing nothing about either I wrote that in my opinion van Gogh painted like a madman and The Little Dancer was ugly.
Still. That’s only my opinion. Next time you are in Tours, see the Degas for yourselves. What do you think?
My art teacher Joan Oxland* told me that van Gogh was indeed mentally unstable and I was not alone in my opinion of The Little Dancer. When it was first shown in Paris in 1881, critics said she looked like a monkey.
*A student at the Sorbonne and the Academie Julian in Paris, her paintings of Cornwall and France were shown regularly at the Royal Academy in London. Her legacy to me was a lifelong passion for art and for France.
Post by Pamela (BA History of Art).
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