Preface

Morton, Mary

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Preface

Mary Morton

Facture: Conservation Science Art History Volume 3: Degas

The National Gallery of Art has the third largest collection of sculptures, paintings, and works on paper by Edgar Degas (1834–1917) in the world, making the dedication of this volume of Facture to his oeuvre...

Author

Mary Morton

PublisherNational Gallery of Art

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-20194

Preface

The National Gallery of Art has the third largest collection of sculptures, paintings, and works on paper by Edgar Degas (1834–1917) in the world, making the dedication of this volume of Facture to his oeuvre during the centennial of his death particularly appropriate. Although there were no works by Degas in the bequests from Andrew W. Mellon and Samuel Kress that established the Gallery in 1941, one year later the Widener Collection gift included Degas’s The Races (1871–1872) and Before the Ballet (1890/1892) alongside extraordinary old master paintings and decorative arts. Since then, almost every founding benefactor has contributed to the Gallery’s Degas holdings. In the 1940s and 1950s, Lessing Rosenwald gave examples of Degas’s experimental work in printmaking, including the artist’s earliest etchings and his first monotype, The Ballet Master (c. 1874), executed with Ludovic Napoléon Lepic, who taught him the technique. Chester Dale’s bequest of 1962 brought the Gallery several painted portraits by Degas and the epic Four Dancers (c. 1899).

Yet no American collector, aside from Louisine Havemeyer and perhaps Norton Simon, was more devoted to Degas than Paul Mellon, who assiduously tracked works by the artist for more than forty years and ultimately gave the lion’s share of his collection to the museum founded by his father. More than any other nineteenth-century French or American master he collected, Mellon focused on this single artist and amassed a rich range of his work. He pursued Degas’s experimental energy into every artistic medium from oil paint to works on paper in charcoal, pastel, and graphite pencil, to printmaking, to sculpting in wax and mixed media.

The earliest work by Degas in the Gallery’s collection is a delicate portrait painting from Paul Mellon of the artist’s brother René (1855), followed by other portraits of family and friends, from Edmondo and Thérèse Morbilli (c. 1865) to Madame Camus (1869/1870) to Madame René De Gas (1872/1873), all gifts of Chester Dale. Mellon shared Degas’s interest in horses and horse racing, represented in marvelous works in different media. In addition to his incomparable collection of Degas’s original wax sculptures, Mellon gave the Gallery The Riders (c. 1885) and the compellingly worked and reworked oil painting Scene from the Steeplechase: The Fallen Jockey, dating from three sessions between 1866 and c. 1897, as well as several preparatory studies on paper. The artist’s fascination with the ballet also crossed media and is represented in the Gallery collection by the Mellon waxes, including the iconic Little Dancer Aged Fourteen (1878–1881); a classic oil painting recently accessioned from the Corcoran Collection, The Dance Class (c. 1873); and the great, late pastel, Ballet Scene (c. 1907) from Chester Dale. As of 2016, the number of works by Degas in the Gallery’s collection had reached 163 — comprising 21 paintings, 65 sculptures, 34 drawings, 40 prints, 2 copper plates, and one volume of soft-ground etchings.

Another exceptional strength at the National Gallery is the breadth and depth of its conservation expertise, notably the collaborative work between the scientific research department and conservation as well as curatorial staff. Degas’s output benefits from advanced technical study more than the work of most artists, perhaps more than that of any other artist in the nineteenth century. Academically trained and obsessively committed to his artistic practice, Degas occasionally pushed a work through perfectly good results to the point of ruination. To help discover his process and intention, the Gallery’s conservators and scientists use noninvasive examination and analyses to identify materials and techniques, enabling them not only to care for the works of art but also to learn more about the artist’s methods. Colleagues throughout the Gallery, often with partners in other institutions, have together transformed our understanding of the work of Degas.

The Gallery’s extensive Degas holdings and conservation resources have inspired groundbreaking exhibitions here, from Wax Sculptures by Degas in 1965 to Degas at the Races in 1998 to Degas/Cassatt in 2014, and have been featured in exhibitions around the world. His sculptures form the basis of an entire volume in the Gallery’s Systematic Catalogues of the collection: Edgar Degas Sculpture (2010) is the only monograph in the series. No serious scholar of Degas is a stranger to the Gallery’s collection, curatorial files, and publications, or to its curators and conservators.

This volume of Facture presents the staff’s latest studies on the artist. It is the first to feature the work of a single artist, and the wide variety of essays gives a sense of the tremendous wealth of the Gallery’s collection and its collaborative scientific, scholarly, and conservation expertise. The only outside contributor to this volume, the Degas scholar Richard Kendall articulates some of the captivating issues raised by technical examination of the artist’s work and introduces the other essays in the context of Degas scholarship. Degas’s practice was characterized by neither the capture of an immediate impression nor a finished, refined product, but rather by a potentially unlimited “series of operations.” Under the constant pressure of his admiration for old master heroes such as Giotto, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, and Eugène Delacroix, he ardently sought out difficulty, pushing himself as a painter, sculptor, printmaker, and poet.

Degas’s complicated paint surfaces, the product of tireless revisions, often reveal traces of the artist’s hand that are discernible to the naked eye or in x-radiographs and infrared images. One essay combines insights into Degas’s compulsive working campaigns and his inability to claim “finish” — from the points of view of a paintings conservator and a curator of French paintings who have worked together for more than two decades. Based on their broad understanding of nineteenth-century painting practice and analyses of Degas’s paintings at the Gallery and in other public and private collections, the authors describe surfaces that range from raw illegibility to exquisitely refined representation, often in the same canvas, as the artist valued flexibility and potential over preservation and closure.

Two essays in the volume address the bedeviling subject of Degas’s sculptural practice. Degas used wax modeling to refine and realize particular poses and gestures of female figures bathing, dressing, and dancing and of horses moving through space. Wax or wax and clay mixtures were ideal media for Degas — open to constant modification, addition, and correction — because they did not dry out and were extremely malleable. He was able to achieve immediate three-dimensional effects of movement, pose, and gesture, and to create expressive silhouettes that, according to contemporary accounts, he dramatized with candlelight in his studio at night.

Based on x-ray fluorescence, microscopy, and gas chromatography in tandem with x-radiography done for the 2010 Systematic Catalogue, a team of conservation scientists has more precisely determined the materials used by Degas in his wax sculptures. Some statuettes contain relatively few constituents, while some mix wax, plastiline, and even cork, wire, wood, fabric, and rags, as the artist incorporated materials he had at hand when creating his figural compositions. The study also more clearly revealed posthumous repairs and interventions, further complicating the sense of the sculptures’ “original state” not only for the waxes but for the bronzes made from them.

Some eighty of these fascinating wax sculptures were inventoried in Degas’s studio when he died in 1917. Seventy-four were considered to be in good enough condition for limited edition bronze reproductions, commissioned by his heirs from the Paris foundry A. A. Hébrard. Each sculpture was to be cast twenty-two times — one set for the heirs, one for the foundry, and an additional twenty labeled from “A” to “T” for sale; thus the total number of possible bronze casts was 1,628. But when the foundry closed in 1937, only 567 casts appeared in the Hébrard ledger. Bronzes continued to be sold, and an inventory in 2009 registered 1,215 Degas bronzes. Casting records for these later works do not exist, however, making the question of unauthorized casts a recurring problem.

Having analyzed approximately two hundred Degas bronzes from museum collections around the world in addition to the Gallery’s collection, two coauthors of the 2010 Systematic Catalogue summarize here recent discoveries that help establish a basis for chronological assignment of undocumented casts. Because the marking system intended to track the casts was not applied consistently or systematically either by the Hébrard foundry or by others after its closing, technical examination, alloy analysis, and comparative imaging are critical to understanding the production of these bronzes.

In addition to paintings and sculptures by Degas, the Gallery collection includes roughly seventy-five of his works on paper. An intensive study of his late pastel Ballet Scene revealed Degas’s inventive use of tracing paper, charcoal and pastel, and fixative to realize wholly original effects. His unusual choice of tracing paper as a support for pastel required a unique working practice to anchor the extremely friable medium to a smooth surface. Gallery conservation scientists and paper conservators used innovative noninvasive imaging techniques to examine multiple layers of this complex composition. They showed Degas exploiting new kinds of tracing paper commercially available in the 1890s to recycle and reposition figures, poses, and gestures in interconnected and reproductive “families” of images and experimenting with surface textures by manipulating pastel in painterly and sculptural ways.

The Degas/Cassatt exhibition featured prints and drawings as well as paintings, enabling comparison of the printmaking modes of each artist during the late 1870s. The head of the Gallery’s paper conservation laboratory studied Degas’s and Mary Cassatt’s work for the unrealized journal of etchings Le Jour et la nuit and here discusses the tools and methods each used to transfer compositions from preliminary drawings to copper plates as well as the grounds and acids used to etch the plates. This essay, focusing on the intriguing prints related to Degas’s Mary Cassatt at the Louvre, elucidates the artist’s development of related images across media, from various etching states to pastel. Inspired by Degas, and using the printing press in his studio, Cassatt employed her own idiosyncratic process to explore the medium’s artistic possibilities.

If the texts in this journal illuminate the extraordinary complexity and virtuosity of Degas’s technique, the final essay offers a reminder that the artist’s goal was emotional and intellectual expression. Degas was a highly literate, classically educated man — a reader and a writer. His greatest sculpture, and perhaps his best-known work of art, Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, scandalized critics when first exhibited in 1881 but has become a popular icon a century later. Both responses attest to an emotional impact that transcends the work’s unprecedented technique. In a sonnet that Degas wrote to his “little dancer,” he addressed a bold young ballerina from the Parisian working class, stepping around notions of ideal beauty to ascend the heights of a revered, classical art.

As evidenced in this volume, the possibilities for continued research into the oeuvre of Degas seem infinite. Endowed through the generosity of our patrons with great depth in the work of this singular nineteenth-century master, the National Gallery is committed to studying Degas’s art and sharing a deeper understanding with experts in the field and with the general public.

Mary Morton

Curator and Head of French Paintings

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