FAMOUS for his paintings of ethereal dancers, French painter Edgar Degas was also a masterly sculptor who delved into issues of movement.

 

“The greatest living sculptor” according to Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Degas never exhibited his three-dimensional studies during his lifetime, with the exception of his piece, Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen.  

 

Prominent museums such as the Metropolitan in New York and Orsay in Paris have showcased Degas the sculptor by displaying bronze casts of the master’s works made from plaster moulds created after he had died. These casts, in some ways inferior, have since been overshadowed by a set of newly discovered moulds used to create more detailed bronzes.

 

Now, a new exhibition of these works, on at the Herakleidon Museum in Thiseio, entitled The Complete Sculptures of Edgar Degas, treats art lovers to the artist’s entire sculptural oeuvre. The bronzes are on loan from the MT Abraham Centre for the Visual Arts. Following its Athens debut, the show is scheduled to travel to Tel Aviv, New Orleans and China. 

 

All 74 bronzes, including the show’s gem, Little Dancer, were cast from a set of plaster moulds made by sculptor and Degas’ close friend Paul-Albert Bartholome while Degas was still alive.

 

“The first bronzes cast from a set of newly discovered plasters are larger, more detailed and closer to the art of Degas,” Walter Maibaum, the exhibition’s curator, told reporters in Athens on November 23.

 

Degas, who began sculpting in the late 1850s, worked in his studio, often from memory, using a soft clay known as plasteline, which he often mixed with beeswax. It is these originals which were eventually used to make the moulds used to pour the bronzes.

 

“He was a perfectionist and kept reworking his waxes throughout his life,” said Maibaum, echoing Degas, who once said that “one has to do the same subject 10 times, even a hundred times over. In art, nothing should look like chance, not even movement.”  

    

Though he saw his sculptures as rough, unfinished sketches, Degas once confided in sculptor Aristide Maillot his aspirations to see his pieces cast in bronze one day. But he refrained from doing so.

 

“It is a tremendous responsibility to leave anything behind in bronze - this medium is for eternity,” Degas once said. 

 

 

Maibaum put down Degas’ unwillingness to exhibit his sculptures to his avant-garde style, which - being ahead of its time - likely would not have been acceptable to his contemporaries. 

 

The terrible reviews that Little Dancer garnered in Paris at the Fifth Impressionist Exhibition, in 1881, were also a major blow.        

 

Today, Maibaum said care is being taken in order not to dilute the artistic value of the statues. Therefore, the vast majority of the bronzes are to be exhibited in museums, with only very few sold to the public, he said.

 

“We are trying to ensure the reputation of the artist.”