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Lot Essay
Dancers account for forty of the seventy-four sculptures that Degas modeled in wax and are known today. Many of these relate to the strict discipline and technique of classical ballet as practiced by the French dance masters and choreographers of the late 19th century. A most remarkable exception, however, is the present sculpture, La danse espagnole, which stands out among the rest for its spontaneous sense of excited abandon and sensuality, characteristics that clearly relate to its Spanish theme.
All things Spanish were very much on the minds of French artists, writers and musicians from mid-century onwards (fig. 1). The French king Louis-Philippe, an ardent Hispanophile, bought large numbers of Spanish artworks during the 1830s for his Galerie Espagnole in Paris. Degas visited Spain in 1889, after he modeled La danse espagnole, but his eye for Spanish painting had already made itself known in his art, especially in his portraits, even if he only rarely treated overtly Spanish subjects.
Spanish dance troupes had been a popular attraction in Paris from the 1830s onward. Conservative dance specialists resisted the intrusion of Spanish elements into classic French ballet, but others, such as the choreographer Carlo Blasis, prized the Spanish character in dance for its "hauteur, pride, love and arrogance" (quoted in S.G. Lindsay, D.S. Barbour and S.G. Sturman, op. cit., p. 159). By Degas' time, the movements of a suitably Europeanized interpretation of Spanish dance forms were standard among balletic character steps. Georges Bizet transposed colorful folkloric elements into the music, drama and dance of his opera Carmen, which premiered in Paris in 1875.
Charles Millard has observed in La danse espagnole "a spiral configuration that rises through the hip-shot torso, around the curving left arm, turned head, and up through the raised right arm, whence it returned to the body by the relationship of the hand to the head...a sculptural statement of a sophistication unrivalled in the nineteenth century. The curving and spiraling of the forms completely does away with any sense of frontality, and the figure is wholly satisfactory from any angle" (The Sculpture of Edgar Degas, Princeton, 1976, pp. 102-103).
"The extreme torsion of this figure is more often associated with the statuettes of bathers and nudes," Jill DeVonyar and Richard Kendall have noted. "It remains, however, a masterful achievement, both as an acute record of a superbly trained professional with an elegantly pointed foot and turned-out leg, and as a thrilling conjunction of rippling surfaces and taut, resilient forms" (Degas and the Dance, exh. cat., American Federation of the Arts, New York, 2002, p. 140).
All things Spanish were very much on the minds of French artists, writers and musicians from mid-century onwards (fig. 1). The French king Louis-Philippe, an ardent Hispanophile, bought large numbers of Spanish artworks during the 1830s for his Galerie Espagnole in Paris. Degas visited Spain in 1889, after he modeled La danse espagnole, but his eye for Spanish painting had already made itself known in his art, especially in his portraits, even if he only rarely treated overtly Spanish subjects.
Spanish dance troupes had been a popular attraction in Paris from the 1830s onward. Conservative dance specialists resisted the intrusion of Spanish elements into classic French ballet, but others, such as the choreographer Carlo Blasis, prized the Spanish character in dance for its "hauteur, pride, love and arrogance" (quoted in S.G. Lindsay, D.S. Barbour and S.G. Sturman, op. cit., p. 159). By Degas' time, the movements of a suitably Europeanized interpretation of Spanish dance forms were standard among balletic character steps. Georges Bizet transposed colorful folkloric elements into the music, drama and dance of his opera Carmen, which premiered in Paris in 1875.
Charles Millard has observed in La danse espagnole "a spiral configuration that rises through the hip-shot torso, around the curving left arm, turned head, and up through the raised right arm, whence it returned to the body by the relationship of the hand to the head...a sculptural statement of a sophistication unrivalled in the nineteenth century. The curving and spiraling of the forms completely does away with any sense of frontality, and the figure is wholly satisfactory from any angle" (The Sculpture of Edgar Degas, Princeton, 1976, pp. 102-103).
"The extreme torsion of this figure is more often associated with the statuettes of bathers and nudes," Jill DeVonyar and Richard Kendall have noted. "It remains, however, a masterful achievement, both as an acute record of a superbly trained professional with an elegantly pointed foot and turned-out leg, and as a thrilling conjunction of rippling surfaces and taut, resilient forms" (Degas and the Dance, exh. cat., American Federation of the Arts, New York, 2002, p. 140).