Edgar Degas

EDGAR DEGAS (Paris, 1834 - 1917).
"Danseuse mettant son bas".
Bronze sculpture with nuanced brown patina.
Numbered 29 IX/IX.
Stamp with Degas' signature on the base.
Stamp "CIRE PERDUE C. VALSUANI".
Casting made under the control of the artist's family.
Provenance: European private collection
Reference Bibliography: Hébrard 29 ; Pingeot 14 ; Rewald 56 ; Czestochowski 29
This edition includes a print run marked A through T and another print run numbered in Roman numerals from I/IX to IX/IX.
A notarized copy of the certificate of authenticity from Artco France Éditeur d'Art, dated 2007, will be given to the buyer.
We thank the Degas committee for their collaboration; an additional certificate of authenticity may be requested at the buyer's expense.
Measurements: 49,7 cm. height.

This is a valuable sculpture by Edgar Degas. "Ballerina putting on a stocking" is a bronze piece that captures an intimate, everyday moment in the world of ballet, in which a young woman is lifting her right leg to pull a stocking up her calf. The gesture, though seemingly trivial, is loaded with grace and balance: the leg in the air is extended with the toe on tiptoe, while the supporting leg is gently flexed, suggesting an almost choreographed attitude. Degas transforms an everyday action into a pose that evokes the elegance of dance, blurring the boundary between the banal and the artistic. The figure is nude, but the modeling does not seek an idealized or precise representation of the body, but rather a material and veiled conception: the surface of the skin is rough, with irregular textures, as if Degas wanted to capture the immediacy of modeling in wax before casting in bronze. The hair in a bun and the round face reinforce the idea of a young woman focused on her task, oblivious to any outside gaze.

This sculpture is closely related to other works by the artist, both in sculpture and in painting and pastel, in which Degas approaches the figure of the dancer in non-stage moments, "backstage", that is, while not performing, but in the private gestures of rehearsal, preparation or rest. For example, it can be linked to his famous series of pastels such as "Dancer at Rest" or "Seated Dancer", where the same interest in spontaneous gestures and in representing the female body from a distant, almost anthropological gaze, without emphasis on ideal beauty, can be perceived. It also connects with his best known sculpture, "Little dancer of fourteen years", where a young girl appears in an attitude of concentration and preparation. The physiognomic features are similar, as well as the irregular surface treatment. Likewise, in both cases, Degas is fascinated by the moments prior to the exit on stage. The figure of the dancer, far from being decorative, concentrates the fleetingness of the movement and the intimacy of the gesture, which Degas fixes in the bronze as an arrested instant.

The first-born son of a wealthy Parisian family, Degas abandoned his law studies at the Sorbonne at an early age to devote himself to painting. In 1855 he entered the studio of Louis Lamothe, a disciple of Ingres, where he acquired a solid academic training. From 1856 to 1859 he traveled through Italy copying the Renaissance masters and, upon his return, he resided forever in Paris, where he devoted himself to representing in his works a wide repertoire of themes of the life of the modern city that the French capital had become. Although linked to the Impressionists, with whom he exhibited in seven of his eight exhibitions, Degas was in some ways an anti-impressionist. He saw himself as a realist or naturalist painter, and his veneration for the finished drawing of Ingres marked his entire output. On the other hand, he focused mainly on the study of the human body and was never interested, as the Impressionists were, either in outdoor landscape painting or in capturing changing atmospheric conditions. He shared, however, with them the influence of the new technique of photography and the newly discovered Japanese prints, as well as an interest in capturing movement. The variations on the same theme, such as the dancers, which he repeated in both painting and sculpture, are an example of this obsession with observing and reproducing the rhythm and postures of people and animals. Like the Impressionists, Degas was particularly interested in the reality of urban life in his environment; thus the opera, the theater, the café-concert or horse races were constant themes in his work. However, the artist brought an original compositional and iconographic invention that gave his painting a new, more profane vision of the world. He eliminated the traditional framing and replaced it with an off-center composition, dominated by the new laws of instantaneity.