BOOK SCULPTURES 3D CLOCK SERIES
Degas’ heirs were in disagreement about a great many things, but by 1918 they had decided to authorize a series of casts, or editions, of bronzes to be made from seventy-two of the small figures. The debate about their preservation and ultimate disposition began. Illustrations of The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer, as well as some of the other better-preserved examples were published in the December 1918 issue of La Renaissance de l’Art Français et des Industries de Luxe, the March 1919 issue of Vanity Fair, and the July–August 1919 issue of Art et Décoration. Nearly all had reached various stages of deterioration. Upon Degas’ death in 1917, more than 150 pieces of sculpture were found in his studio. Numerous visits to the racetrack at Longchamp were supplemented by careful scrutiny of photographs, especially the studies of horses in motion made in the 1870s and 1880s by the English photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904). The same painstaking observation went into his modeling of horses. Others recorded women in various stages of washing and drying themselves that provided the opportunity for depicting female nudity in an unidealized fashion.
For many of them, the artist found a ready source of inspiration in the ballet dancers of the Paris Opéra. The human figures often repeat the same subject, each displaying subtle variations in composition or in the dynamics of movement or of muscular tensions within the body. The rest of his sculpture remained a private medium, akin to sketches or drawings, in which Degas, limiting himself to a small range of subjects, explored the problems that fascinated him. The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer was not seen again publicly until April 1920. Modeled in wax and wearing a real bodice, stockings, shoes, tulle skirt, and horsehair wig with a satin ribbon, the figure astonished Degas’ contemporaries, not only for its unorthodox use of materials, but also and above all for its realism, judged brutish by some. It was shown in the sixth Impressionist exhibition held in Paris in 1881, but the work has little to do with Impressionism. The exception was The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer. He was never interested in creating public monuments and, with one exception, neither did he display his sculpture publicly. Degas’ sculpture stands outside the mainstream of nineteenth-century French sculpture.
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