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拍品專文
Le tub is widely regarded as the most innovative and important work of Degas' entire sculpted oeuvre. In his ground-breaking monograph on Degas sculpture, Charles Millard called Le tub "the most original not only of his own pieces but of all nineteenth-century sculpture" (C.W. Millard, op. cit., p. 107). Other scholars have likewise claimed, "It is difficult to exaggerate the brilliance and originality of The Tub" (T. Porterfield and R.R. Brettell, Degas in The Art Institute of Chicago, New York, 1984, p. 164). With its bold combination of materials in the original and its deliberate revision of the traditional syntax of the female body and the structure of viewing in which it is situated, Degas' sculpture anticipates many of the preoccupations and innovations of modern artists. Although executed in the nineteenth century, the work represents a palpably twentieth-century statement - a "touchstone of modernity", according to Patricia Canterbury (in A. Dumas and D.A. Brenneman, eds., Degas and America: The Early Collectors, exh. cat., High Museum of Art, Atlanta, 2001, p. 241); "the first modernist sculpture", according to Ronald Pickvance (Degas, exh. cat., Fondation Pierre Gianadda, Martigny, 1993, p. 201).
Le tub is one of only a few sculptures by Degas that can be dated with any certainty. In a letter to the sculptor Albert Bartholemé on 13 June 1889, Degas described his progress on the composition (fig. 1), "I have worked the little wax a great deal. I have made a base for it with rags soaked in a more or less well-mixed plaster" (quoted in J.S. Boggs, Degas, exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1988, p. 469). According to Millard, the base would have been among the finishing touches that Degas added to the sculpture, suggesting that it was near completion by the summer of 1889 (C.W. Millard, op. cit., p. 10). It is not known, however, when Le tub was first conceived. Around the middle of the decade, Degas made a series of pastels depicting women standing, kneeling, squatting, or sitting in a shallow basin (fig. 2; also cf. Lemoisne 738, 765, 816, 872, 1097); several of these were exhibited in the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition in 1886, and the wax bather was perhaps begun around the same time. A letter that Degas wrote to Bartholemé in 1888 may also include a reference to Le tub, "I have not done enough horses. The women must wait in their basins" (quoted in J.S. Boggs, op. cit., p. 469).
Arguably the most radical element of Le tub is its incorporation of real materials or objets trouvés - an overt challenge to the accepted criteria of sculpture in the late nineteenth century, unprecedented except in Degas' own Petite danseuse de quatorze ans of 1881. The original version of Le tub consists of a reddish-brown wax figure reclining in an actual lead basin; plaster had been poured into the bottom of the basin to simulate water, and real draperies soaked in plaster crumpled around the tub. The sculpture, then, is at once illusory and real - a precursor to a long line of twentieth-century assemblages, from Cubist collages and Duchamp readymades to Surrealist objects and Rauschenberg combine-paintings.
John Richardson has identified as "the first example of what would come to be called a readymade" the perforated silver spoon that crowns Picasso's 1914 Verre d'absinthe (fig. 3) - a work that was executed twenty-five years after Degas' Tub (J. Richardson, A Life of Picasso, New York, 1996, vol. 2, p. 291). Indeed, the possibility exists that Degas not only anticipated Picasso's interest in juxtaposing levels of illusion and reality, but actually served as an inspiration to the younger artist. Although there is no evidence that the two ever met, it is conceivable that Picasso had heard reports about the contents of Degas' studio, including his audacious experiments in sculpture. Suzanne Valadon, a member of Picasso's circle, knew Degas for over a decade and claimed to call on him every day, while Picasso's lover Fernande Olivier explicitly reports seeing examples of Degas' sculpture in his studio on the rue Victor Massé, "I went to Degas' house with Benedetta Canals who was his friend. He is not painting at the moment but working on little statuettes". (quoted in R. Kendall, "Who Said Anything About Rodin?: The Visibility and Contemporary Renown of Degas' Late Sculpture", Apollo, August 1995, p. 77).
The second pioneering feature of Le tub is the unusual vantage point that it forces the spectator to adopt. Since the bather is partially submerged in the shallow basin, a full view of the figure can be obtained only by looking down at her - making Le tub, according to Millard, perhaps the only piece of nineteenth-century sculpture intended to be seen directly from above (C.W. Millard, op. cit., p. 107). This intrusive and controlling vantage point is the basis for a profound tension in the structure of the work. On the one hand, it establishes the bather as sexually submissive and erotically available, exposed to the male viewer's probing gaze. At the same time, however, the intimacy of the scene - the self-absorption of the bather's pose, the way that her body folds inward - deflects and excludes the observer, negating the offer of erotic appropriation traditionally associated with the female nude. Le tub thus problematizes the issue of male spectatorship, especially of the voyeur's implied presence in a position of mastery; as Anthea Callen has explained:
In most representations of the female body, self-consciousness is signaled, if not by eye-contact, by poses which 'display' the body to a privileged spectator. The body is objectified for uninterrupted consumption by a male spectator, whose presence is thereby assumed... Degas' work disrupts these conventions of display. The spectator's confrontation with the Bathers' bodies is neither relieved nor mediated by familiar pictorial conventions of nudity. The pictured bodies inscribe no discourse of complicity to orchestrate the spectator's pleasurable consumption of them; the implicit intrusion of a male viewer into the privacy of a female space is thus encoded. Spectating is made uneasy - a silent, voyeuristic soliloquy. (A. Callen, "Degas' Bathers: Hygiene and Dirt, Gaze and Touch", in R. Kendall and G. Pollock, eds., Dealing with Degas: Representations of Women and the Politics of Vision, New York, 1992, pp. 165-166)
Even Degas himself acknowledged that his images of bathers subverted traditional structures of viewing, "Until now, the nude has always been presented in poses which assume the presence of an audience, but these women of mine are decent, simple human beings who have no other concern than that of their physical condition...it is as though one were watching through a keyhole..." (quoted in G. Adriani, Degas: Pastels, Oil Sketches, Drawings, London, 1985, p. 86).
Degas' manifest interest in the politics of vision again anticipates one of the primary concerns of twentieth-century artists. Cindy Sherman's film stills, for instance - in which the artist herself plays the leading role - function like Le tub to subvert the conventions of voyeurism and scopophilia associated with the female body. In a work like Black Bra (fig. 4), the high vantage point again implies the presence of a controlling gaze; yet the object of vision is now the artist herself and the privileged gaze her own - a fact which Sherman deliberately highlights by leaving the cord for the shutter partially exposed. In a series of etchings from 1971 that likewise explore the dynamics of viewing, Picasso goes so far as to feature Degas himself as the proverbial voyeur (Bloch 136-140; 142-150; 159-163; 166; 168-169; 184-185); as he told Pierre Daix, "He would have given me a boot in the arse, old Degas, if he had seen himself like this!" (quoted in P. Daix, Picasso, Life and Art, New York, 1993, p. 366).
The tensions and contradictions that characterize the relationship between viewer and viewed in Le tub are heightened by a profound uncertainty about the identity of the woman depicted. Bathing was unquestionably associated with prostitution in the late nineteenth century. Although middle-class women were discouraged from bathing, prostitutes were required to do so regularly; one nineteenth-century authority on prostitution, Aléxandre-Jean-Batiste Parent-Duchâtelet, was certain that frequent baths caused the plumpness of courtesans, while another attributed their infertility to the habit of bathing (E. Lipton, "The Bathers: Modernity and Prostitution", Looking Into Degas: Uneasy Images of Women and Modern Life, Berkeley, 1986, p. 169). Degas himself explicitly depicted a prostitute at her bath in a monotype from the late 1870s, an image that was selected by Vollard to illustrate de Maupassant's celebrated story of a brothel, the Tellier Establishment. In Le tub, by contrast, an overtly sexual narrative has been suppressed; one can no longer say with certainty whether the bather is a prostitute, a working woman, or even a modern bourgeoise. The sculpture thus functions as a visual analogue for the confusing reality of late nineteenth-century France, in which changing definitions of sexuality and class made the parameters of prostitution increasingly difficult to define. As one critic has concluded, "Uncertainty about the sexual status of the women depicted provides Degas' images with one of their most powerful effects of modernity. A hint of prostitution is countered by a suggestion of autonomy; an alluring appearance of sexual accessibility is undermined by an alienating sense of the subject's absorption..." (C. Bernheimer, "Degas's Brothels: Voyeurism and Ideology", Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century France, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1989, p. 163).
Le tub, like all of Degas's sculptures, was cast in bronze by the Hébrard foundry following the artist's death in 1917. The subtle contrasts of color and texture that distinguish the mixed-media original made Le tub one of the most challenging of Degas' sculptures to realize in bronze; the present cast, with its polychromatic patina and delicacy of detail, is a testament to the technical brilliance of Albino Palazzolo, the maître d'atelier of the Hébrard foundry. Palazzolo's success at faithfully replicating Degas' originals was recognized by critics upon the first exhibition of the bronzes in 1921; as François Thiébault-Sisson wrote in Le Temps, "It was a singularly delicate task to give bronze form to these fragile marvels while keeping their accents intact and rigorously abstaining from recourse to invention, often so treacherous, of the restorer. The founder acquitted himself of it to his glory... Nothing that was lacking was replaced; nothing incomplete was finished" (quoted in P. Failing, "Authorship and Physical Evidence: The Creative Process", Apollo, August 1995, p. 58). Likewise, Mary Cassatt, who postponed an eye operation to visit the 1921 exhibition, later wrote to Hébrard, "I must tell you how much I enjoyed the exhibition of Degas' sculpture. It is very rare in the history of art that an artist has equal talent for painting and sculpture. I do not know of any other example. All artists and collectors are indebted to you for the admirable work you have done in reproducing so perfectly these fragile works in bronze" (quoted in ibid., p. 58).
The present bronze was originally purchased by the Norwegian art dealer Walter Halvorsen and was one of only two complete sets of Degas' bronzes consigned to the United States - the other set was purchased by Louisine Havemeyer. In 1928 Frank Crowninshield, a distinguished collector, owner of Vanity Fair and one of the founding members of New York's The Museum of Modern Art purchased this bronze. Having founded Vanity Fair in 1914, his magazine was one of the first publications to illustrate Degas' sculptures in 1919. The original wax version of Le tub is now housed in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and the bronze modèle, or master cast, in the Norton Simon Art Museum, Pasadena. Other bronze casts may be found in major museum collections around the world, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen; and the Musée d'Orsay, Paris.
We would like to thank Joseph S. Czestochowski for his additional research.
The present work on view lower center at Durand-Ruel Galleries, 6-27 December 1922.
(Archives Photographiques, Durand-Ruel; photograph in the forthcoming publication J.C. Czestochowski and A. Pingeot, Degas Sculptures, 2002)
(fig. 1) Edgar Degas, Le tub (wax original), 1886-1889.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
(fig. 2) Edgar Degas, Femme au tub, 1884.
(Christie's, New York, 30 April 1996, lot 13)
(fig. 3) Pablo Picasso, Verre d'absinthe, 1914.
Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
© 2002 Estate of Pablo Picasso Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
(fig. 4) Cindy Sherman, Untitled (Black Bra), 1977.
(Christie's, New York, 14 February 1991, lot 55)
Le tub is one of only a few sculptures by Degas that can be dated with any certainty. In a letter to the sculptor Albert Bartholemé on 13 June 1889, Degas described his progress on the composition (fig. 1), "I have worked the little wax a great deal. I have made a base for it with rags soaked in a more or less well-mixed plaster" (quoted in J.S. Boggs, Degas, exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1988, p. 469). According to Millard, the base would have been among the finishing touches that Degas added to the sculpture, suggesting that it was near completion by the summer of 1889 (C.W. Millard, op. cit., p. 10). It is not known, however, when Le tub was first conceived. Around the middle of the decade, Degas made a series of pastels depicting women standing, kneeling, squatting, or sitting in a shallow basin (fig. 2; also cf. Lemoisne 738, 765, 816, 872, 1097); several of these were exhibited in the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition in 1886, and the wax bather was perhaps begun around the same time. A letter that Degas wrote to Bartholemé in 1888 may also include a reference to Le tub, "I have not done enough horses. The women must wait in their basins" (quoted in J.S. Boggs, op. cit., p. 469).
Arguably the most radical element of Le tub is its incorporation of real materials or objets trouvés - an overt challenge to the accepted criteria of sculpture in the late nineteenth century, unprecedented except in Degas' own Petite danseuse de quatorze ans of 1881. The original version of Le tub consists of a reddish-brown wax figure reclining in an actual lead basin; plaster had been poured into the bottom of the basin to simulate water, and real draperies soaked in plaster crumpled around the tub. The sculpture, then, is at once illusory and real - a precursor to a long line of twentieth-century assemblages, from Cubist collages and Duchamp readymades to Surrealist objects and Rauschenberg combine-paintings.
John Richardson has identified as "the first example of what would come to be called a readymade" the perforated silver spoon that crowns Picasso's 1914 Verre d'absinthe (fig. 3) - a work that was executed twenty-five years after Degas' Tub (J. Richardson, A Life of Picasso, New York, 1996, vol. 2, p. 291). Indeed, the possibility exists that Degas not only anticipated Picasso's interest in juxtaposing levels of illusion and reality, but actually served as an inspiration to the younger artist. Although there is no evidence that the two ever met, it is conceivable that Picasso had heard reports about the contents of Degas' studio, including his audacious experiments in sculpture. Suzanne Valadon, a member of Picasso's circle, knew Degas for over a decade and claimed to call on him every day, while Picasso's lover Fernande Olivier explicitly reports seeing examples of Degas' sculpture in his studio on the rue Victor Massé, "I went to Degas' house with Benedetta Canals who was his friend. He is not painting at the moment but working on little statuettes". (quoted in R. Kendall, "Who Said Anything About Rodin?: The Visibility and Contemporary Renown of Degas' Late Sculpture", Apollo, August 1995, p. 77).
The second pioneering feature of Le tub is the unusual vantage point that it forces the spectator to adopt. Since the bather is partially submerged in the shallow basin, a full view of the figure can be obtained only by looking down at her - making Le tub, according to Millard, perhaps the only piece of nineteenth-century sculpture intended to be seen directly from above (C.W. Millard, op. cit., p. 107). This intrusive and controlling vantage point is the basis for a profound tension in the structure of the work. On the one hand, it establishes the bather as sexually submissive and erotically available, exposed to the male viewer's probing gaze. At the same time, however, the intimacy of the scene - the self-absorption of the bather's pose, the way that her body folds inward - deflects and excludes the observer, negating the offer of erotic appropriation traditionally associated with the female nude. Le tub thus problematizes the issue of male spectatorship, especially of the voyeur's implied presence in a position of mastery; as Anthea Callen has explained:
In most representations of the female body, self-consciousness is signaled, if not by eye-contact, by poses which 'display' the body to a privileged spectator. The body is objectified for uninterrupted consumption by a male spectator, whose presence is thereby assumed... Degas' work disrupts these conventions of display. The spectator's confrontation with the Bathers' bodies is neither relieved nor mediated by familiar pictorial conventions of nudity. The pictured bodies inscribe no discourse of complicity to orchestrate the spectator's pleasurable consumption of them; the implicit intrusion of a male viewer into the privacy of a female space is thus encoded. Spectating is made uneasy - a silent, voyeuristic soliloquy. (A. Callen, "Degas' Bathers: Hygiene and Dirt, Gaze and Touch", in R. Kendall and G. Pollock, eds., Dealing with Degas: Representations of Women and the Politics of Vision, New York, 1992, pp. 165-166)
Even Degas himself acknowledged that his images of bathers subverted traditional structures of viewing, "Until now, the nude has always been presented in poses which assume the presence of an audience, but these women of mine are decent, simple human beings who have no other concern than that of their physical condition...it is as though one were watching through a keyhole..." (quoted in G. Adriani, Degas: Pastels, Oil Sketches, Drawings, London, 1985, p. 86).
Degas' manifest interest in the politics of vision again anticipates one of the primary concerns of twentieth-century artists. Cindy Sherman's film stills, for instance - in which the artist herself plays the leading role - function like Le tub to subvert the conventions of voyeurism and scopophilia associated with the female body. In a work like Black Bra (fig. 4), the high vantage point again implies the presence of a controlling gaze; yet the object of vision is now the artist herself and the privileged gaze her own - a fact which Sherman deliberately highlights by leaving the cord for the shutter partially exposed. In a series of etchings from 1971 that likewise explore the dynamics of viewing, Picasso goes so far as to feature Degas himself as the proverbial voyeur (Bloch 136-140; 142-150; 159-163; 166; 168-169; 184-185); as he told Pierre Daix, "He would have given me a boot in the arse, old Degas, if he had seen himself like this!" (quoted in P. Daix, Picasso, Life and Art, New York, 1993, p. 366).
The tensions and contradictions that characterize the relationship between viewer and viewed in Le tub are heightened by a profound uncertainty about the identity of the woman depicted. Bathing was unquestionably associated with prostitution in the late nineteenth century. Although middle-class women were discouraged from bathing, prostitutes were required to do so regularly; one nineteenth-century authority on prostitution, Aléxandre-Jean-Batiste Parent-Duchâtelet, was certain that frequent baths caused the plumpness of courtesans, while another attributed their infertility to the habit of bathing (E. Lipton, "The Bathers: Modernity and Prostitution", Looking Into Degas: Uneasy Images of Women and Modern Life, Berkeley, 1986, p. 169). Degas himself explicitly depicted a prostitute at her bath in a monotype from the late 1870s, an image that was selected by Vollard to illustrate de Maupassant's celebrated story of a brothel, the Tellier Establishment. In Le tub, by contrast, an overtly sexual narrative has been suppressed; one can no longer say with certainty whether the bather is a prostitute, a working woman, or even a modern bourgeoise. The sculpture thus functions as a visual analogue for the confusing reality of late nineteenth-century France, in which changing definitions of sexuality and class made the parameters of prostitution increasingly difficult to define. As one critic has concluded, "Uncertainty about the sexual status of the women depicted provides Degas' images with one of their most powerful effects of modernity. A hint of prostitution is countered by a suggestion of autonomy; an alluring appearance of sexual accessibility is undermined by an alienating sense of the subject's absorption..." (C. Bernheimer, "Degas's Brothels: Voyeurism and Ideology", Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century France, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1989, p. 163).
Le tub, like all of Degas's sculptures, was cast in bronze by the Hébrard foundry following the artist's death in 1917. The subtle contrasts of color and texture that distinguish the mixed-media original made Le tub one of the most challenging of Degas' sculptures to realize in bronze; the present cast, with its polychromatic patina and delicacy of detail, is a testament to the technical brilliance of Albino Palazzolo, the maître d'atelier of the Hébrard foundry. Palazzolo's success at faithfully replicating Degas' originals was recognized by critics upon the first exhibition of the bronzes in 1921; as François Thiébault-Sisson wrote in Le Temps, "It was a singularly delicate task to give bronze form to these fragile marvels while keeping their accents intact and rigorously abstaining from recourse to invention, often so treacherous, of the restorer. The founder acquitted himself of it to his glory... Nothing that was lacking was replaced; nothing incomplete was finished" (quoted in P. Failing, "Authorship and Physical Evidence: The Creative Process", Apollo, August 1995, p. 58). Likewise, Mary Cassatt, who postponed an eye operation to visit the 1921 exhibition, later wrote to Hébrard, "I must tell you how much I enjoyed the exhibition of Degas' sculpture. It is very rare in the history of art that an artist has equal talent for painting and sculpture. I do not know of any other example. All artists and collectors are indebted to you for the admirable work you have done in reproducing so perfectly these fragile works in bronze" (quoted in ibid., p. 58).
The present bronze was originally purchased by the Norwegian art dealer Walter Halvorsen and was one of only two complete sets of Degas' bronzes consigned to the United States - the other set was purchased by Louisine Havemeyer. In 1928 Frank Crowninshield, a distinguished collector, owner of Vanity Fair and one of the founding members of New York's The Museum of Modern Art purchased this bronze. Having founded Vanity Fair in 1914, his magazine was one of the first publications to illustrate Degas' sculptures in 1919. The original wax version of Le tub is now housed in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and the bronze modèle, or master cast, in the Norton Simon Art Museum, Pasadena. Other bronze casts may be found in major museum collections around the world, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen; and the Musée d'Orsay, Paris.
We would like to thank Joseph S. Czestochowski for his additional research.
The present work on view lower center at Durand-Ruel Galleries, 6-27 December 1922.
(Archives Photographiques, Durand-Ruel; photograph in the forthcoming publication J.C. Czestochowski and A. Pingeot, Degas Sculptures, 2002)
(fig. 1) Edgar Degas, Le tub (wax original), 1886-1889.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
(fig. 2) Edgar Degas, Femme au tub, 1884.
(Christie's, New York, 30 April 1996, lot 13)
(fig. 3) Pablo Picasso, Verre d'absinthe, 1914.
Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
© 2002 Estate of Pablo Picasso Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
(fig. 4) Cindy Sherman, Untitled (Black Bra), 1977.
(Christie's, New York, 14 February 1991, lot 55)