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Lot Essay
Degas' interest in dance dominated his work during the 1880s. Arabesque sur la jambe droite, le bras gauche dans la ligne "belongs to a period in the mid-1880s when his sculpture reached a kind of classical zenith" (quoted in Degas, exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1988, p. 586). Indeed the present sculpture displays extraordinary balance and poise. The surface is smoothly modeled, in contrast to the works of later years. This refined technique contributes to the classical perfection of the pose. Degas was always interested in movement (he sculpted his series of horses to help him to understand their bodies in motion), and here he has captured the young dancer in a split second of absolute equilibrium.
John Rewald writes:
It was in 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 which 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'" (Rewald, op. cit., 1990, p. 23).
John Rewald writes:
It was in 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 which 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'" (Rewald, op. cit., 1990, p. 23).