Edgar Degas – Petite danseuse de quatorze ans
Sotheby’s To Sell Petite danseuse de quatorze ans
Sotheby’s is delighted to announce that it is to offer Petite danseuse dequatorze ans in its next sale of Impressionist and Modern Art in London on the 3rd of February 2009
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January 10 2009 – Estimated at £9 – 12 million, Petite danseuse de quatorze ans is one of the most ambitious and iconic ofDegas’s works and a groundbreaking sculpture from the Impressionist period. The bronze cast to be offeredat Sotheby’s is one of only a handful of casts remaining in private hands. This sale therefore represents a rareopportunity to acquire an icon of Impressionist art.
Melanie Clore, Sotheby’s Co-chairman, Impressionist & Modern Art, comments: “Petite danseuse dequatorze ans is the most important and iconic sculpture by Edgar Degas. We are thrilled to be offering thisremarkable work which is so celebrated for the revolutionary nature of its modern sculptural form.”
Petite danseuse de quatorze ans is a striking work which shows a young ballet dancer assuming a delicate andsubtle pose; the viewer is at once struck by the extraordinarily realistic depiction of the 14-year-old girl.Created in wax circa 1879-81, Petite danseuse de quatorze ans was the only sculpture to have been exhibitedduring the artist’s lifetime. Using a wire armature for the body and hemp for the arms and hands, Degasworked in modelling wax, dressing the figure in real silk, tulle and gauze. The wig came from MadameCusset, supplier of ‘hair for puppets and dolls’. The wax sculpture was found in Degas’s studio following hisdeath in 1917 and cast in bronze in from 1922.
His model was Marie van Goethem, the daughter of a Belgian tailor and laundress, who was a ballet studentat the Opéra and among the dancers of the Opéra who were of particular interest to Degas at this time.Degas used these dancers as the source of his inspiration for many of his most important works in variousdifferent media, including Danseuse au repos, an exquisite pastel and gouache created in the same period,which sold for a new world record price for the artist of $37,042,500 at Sotheby’s New York on the 3rdNovember 2008.
Reviewing the exhibition of Petite danseuse de quatorze ans in Paris in 1881 for the first time in the SixthImpressionist Exhibition of 1881, the critic J.K. Huysmans remarked:
“ . . . M. Degas has knocked over the traditions of sculpture, just as he has for a long time been shaking upthe conventions of painting . . . At once refined and barbaric . . . this statuette is the only truly modernattempt I know in sculpture.”
Jules Claretie, writing in La Vie à Paris in 1881, was charmed by the dancer’s carefree spirit, referring to her“strangely attractive, disturbing and unique naturalism, which recalls with a very Parisian and polished notethe Realism of Spanish polychrome sculpture.”
The majority of other casts are in major international museum collections, including Tate Gallery, theMetropolitan Museum of Art New York, Philadelphia Museum of Art and Museé d’Orsay in Paris.
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