Degas represented dancers in almost all mediums. His first known paintings, pastels, and drawings of dancers closely followed his two-dimensional works of horses in the 1860s. He apparently began making sculpture of dancers in the 1870s, the years during which he exhibited two-dimensional dance subjects so regularly that critics dubbed him the painter of dancers. These works were also commercially successful; by 1880 he complained buyers pursued little else. After 1900, dancers, with bathers, were his primary focus in all mediums. Degas was also personally interested in dance. He followed productions closely and critically, both at the Opéra and elsewhere.
Asked why he painted the dance, Degas gave several answers. Ambroise Vollard maintains the artist claimed he wanted only to render movement and beautiful costumes, yet Louisine Havemeyer remembers him saying he painted dancers because ballet “is all that is left us of the combined movement of the Greeks.” For certain recent scholars, dance is Degas’s own professional metaphor, making his dance subjects the projection of his vision of his own art as grueling, systematic work, the unveiling of a theatrical illusion. Lillian Browse feels that dance “inevitably” drew Degas because its foundation, as with painting, was the human body.
With Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, the most famous of them all, Degas’s figures of dancers are his most familiar sculpture. They are also the most abundant, with thirty-eight recorded (more than twice the number of horses and bathers) and thirty-five surviving waxes and bronzes of the rest. The exceptional number of variants or recurring poses in this group suggests that Degas’s sculpture, like his paintings and pastels, explores subjects repeatedly, as he claimed to his friend Paul-Albert Bartholomé, so nothing is accidental. Certain poses relate only broadly, while others are nearly identical. There are, for instance, eight extant figures represented in arabesque positions, six figures holding one foot, and four dancers at rest. Those that Paul Mellon gave to the National Gallery of Art permit close comparison. The collection has five figures in arabesque, three dancers putting on tights and stockings, three holding a foot, two in the elevated form of fourth position front (grand quatrième devant), and two bowing dancers. Differences in their scale, formal approach, material, and technique emphasize the complexities involved in deciphering Degas’s working method and dating the lifetime works.
Degas’s sculpture of dancers does not look like others of the period, which are as plentiful and varied as they are unfamiliar. Most of Degas’s dancers are anonymous, unlike those to which they are often compared, Auguste Barre’s fastidious portrait-statuettes of famous dancers in famous roles. Even Degas’s most energetic figures are remote from the later picturesque figurines of generic ballerinas. They are all united, nonetheless, by an underlying concept: as three-dimensional figurative arts, freestanding sculpture and dance are kindred forms at the center of a civilization, a view promoted by neoclassical theories that dominated art and dance well into the twentieth century. Figurative sculpture was the durable alter ego of dance, which, since antiquity, had served as sacred communion with the divine through movement, as one of the high arts, and as an essential means for social bonding. This perceived affinity led to radical reforms, in the late eighteenth century, in the theory and practice of dance and to a surge in sculpture of dancers, both based on antique prototypes. The dancer-teacher Carlo Blasis upheld the classical statue as his model for the new dance, and the sculptor Antonio Canova devised new types of modern sculpture that gave three-dimensional form the “grace” applauded in frescoes of female dancers that had just been discovered at Herculaneum and Pompeii. Conceived with a lyrical blend of softened “feminine” classicism and naturalism (fig. 1), Canova’s figures of female dancers made this weighty medium seem to float as well as move with trained grace. Such sculpture provided a lively, seductive “modern” alternative to the ponderous masculine grandeur of the dominant forms of neoclassical idealism. With Canova’s example for statues and Clodion’s (Claude Michel) for statuettes, this type took strong hold in France and was closely followed in the public forum.