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Lot Essay
This dancer has assumed on stage the position from which she will take her first steps. Concentrating her weight on her left leg, while angling her body toward the audience in a three-quarter view, she advances her right foot, the tip of which barely touches the floor. She extends toward the audience her left arm, as if beckoning to them, greeting them with the courtesy of an appreciative salute. She has simultaneously raised her right arm to the opposite side, high above her head, to draw attention to the series of steps and positions that she is about to commence. This is the préparation à la danse, the very beginning of the program that would soon follow. She will repeat this position numerous times during the evening’s performance, as a transitional motif, uniting one segment of her part in the ballet choreography with the next.
The elegant lines and graceful poise of this assertive stance, in both 19th-century ballet performance and Degas’s treatment of such dance positions in his sculpture and two-dimensional oeuvre, largely derive from classical sculpture of the Greek and Roman periods. Charles W. Millard suggested that in Préparation à la danse, pied droit en avant Degas was alluding to a Roman copy of a Greek sculpture in the Louvre depicting the goddess Athena, which he would have seen with its arms recreated, since removed (op. cit., 1976, p. 67, fig. 52). The Athena Farnese in Naples represents this subject in its complete form.
In 1903, Louisine Havemeyer, while visiting Degas in his studio to inquire about purchasing from him the sculpture Petite danseuse de quatorze ans (Rewald, no. XX) “asked the question—I blush to record it,” she later wrote—“a question that had often been asked me: ‘Why, Monsieur Degas, do you always do ballet dancers?’ The quick reply was: ‘Because, Madame, it is all that is left us of the combined movements of the Greeks.’ It was so kindly said, I felt he forgave me the silly question and for not understanding him better” (Sixteen to Sixty: Memoirs of a Collector, New York, 1961, p. 256). Degas was insisting in his “puzzling response,” as Jill DeVonyer and Richard Kendall have explained, “on the association of his ballet subjects with the serene and timeless values of classical civilization” (Degas and the Dance, exh. cat., Detroit Institute of Arts, 2002, p. 235).
Other casts of the present sculpture can be found in public institutions including: Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; The Norton Simon Art Foundation, Pasadena; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown; Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham, United Kingdom; Musée d’Orsay, Paris; NY Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen; Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Brazil and the Art Institute of Chicago.
The elegant lines and graceful poise of this assertive stance, in both 19th-century ballet performance and Degas’s treatment of such dance positions in his sculpture and two-dimensional oeuvre, largely derive from classical sculpture of the Greek and Roman periods. Charles W. Millard suggested that in Préparation à la danse, pied droit en avant Degas was alluding to a Roman copy of a Greek sculpture in the Louvre depicting the goddess Athena, which he would have seen with its arms recreated, since removed (op. cit., 1976, p. 67, fig. 52). The Athena Farnese in Naples represents this subject in its complete form.
In 1903, Louisine Havemeyer, while visiting Degas in his studio to inquire about purchasing from him the sculpture Petite danseuse de quatorze ans (Rewald, no. XX) “asked the question—I blush to record it,” she later wrote—“a question that had often been asked me: ‘Why, Monsieur Degas, do you always do ballet dancers?’ The quick reply was: ‘Because, Madame, it is all that is left us of the combined movements of the Greeks.’ It was so kindly said, I felt he forgave me the silly question and for not understanding him better” (Sixteen to Sixty: Memoirs of a Collector, New York, 1961, p. 256). Degas was insisting in his “puzzling response,” as Jill DeVonyer and Richard Kendall have explained, “on the association of his ballet subjects with the serene and timeless values of classical civilization” (Degas and the Dance, exh. cat., Detroit Institute of Arts, 2002, p. 235).
Other casts of the present sculpture can be found in public institutions including: Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; The Norton Simon Art Foundation, Pasadena; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown; Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham, United Kingdom; Musée d’Orsay, Paris; NY Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen; Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Brazil and the Art Institute of Chicago.