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拍品专文
Edgar Degas' interest in dance dominated his work during the 1880s. During this time he worked on a series of sculptures portraying dancers in different stages of the arabesque pose. Degas' sculpture seems to have grown out of a desire to fully understand different poses of his subjects that he had already explored in paintings, pastels and drawings. While it is almost certain that Degas used his wax sculptures as models for some of his later drawings and paintings, he also seems to have gained much pleasure from the act of modeling wax and clay for its own sake. He had no intention of exhibiting these sculptures in public--a fact that emphasizes the essentially private and exploratory aspect of this part of his oeuvre.
The choice of the dancer was a natural progression from his earlier equine sculptures and his interest in Muybridge's photographs of sequential movement. According to Charles Millard: "Although the horses offered [Degas] the advantage of extenuating the relationship of the piece of sculpture to its base, they were ultimately less satisfactory than dancing figures as a means of developing the rising motion by which a figure seems to lift off its base that so interested him (op. cit., p. 102). John Rewald has noted: "It was out of his passionate search for movement that all the statuettes of dancers doing arabesques, bowing, rubbing their knees, putting their stockings on, etc., and of women arranging their hair, stretching, rubbing their neck and so on were created. All of these women are caught in poses that represent one single instant, in an arrested movement which is pregnant with the movement just completed and the one about to follow. To use Baudelaire's words, Degas 'loved the human body as a material harmony, as a beautiful architecture with the addition of movement'" (op. cit., 1990, p. 23).
Arabesque sur la jambe droite, le bras gauche dans la ligne shows Degas working in a largely classical manner, employing refined, smooth modeling to the surface and rendering the figure with proportional exactitude. Degas is reported to have said that in choosing the dancer as subject he "purely and simply followed the Greek tradition, almost all antique statues representing movements and equilibrium of rhythmic dances" (H. Hertz, Degas, Paris, 1920, p. 37).
The choice of the dancer was a natural progression from his earlier equine sculptures and his interest in Muybridge's photographs of sequential movement. According to Charles Millard: "Although the horses offered [Degas] the advantage of extenuating the relationship of the piece of sculpture to its base, they were ultimately less satisfactory than dancing figures as a means of developing the rising motion by which a figure seems to lift off its base that so interested him (op. cit., p. 102). John Rewald has noted: "It was out of his passionate search for movement that all the statuettes of dancers doing arabesques, bowing, rubbing their knees, putting their stockings on, etc., and of women arranging their hair, stretching, rubbing their neck and so on were created. All of these women are caught in poses that represent one single instant, in an arrested movement which is pregnant with the movement just completed and the one about to follow. To use Baudelaire's words, Degas 'loved the human body as a material harmony, as a beautiful architecture with the addition of movement'" (op. cit., 1990, p. 23).
Arabesque sur la jambe droite, le bras gauche dans la ligne shows Degas working in a largely classical manner, employing refined, smooth modeling to the surface and rendering the figure with proportional exactitude. Degas is reported to have said that in choosing the dancer as subject he "purely and simply followed the Greek tradition, almost all antique statues representing movements and equilibrium of rhythmic dances" (H. Hertz, Degas, Paris, 1920, p. 37).