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拍品專文
Degas illustrated every aspect of dance from rehearsal to performance, resulting in more than fifteen hundred works in various media. That dance captivated Degas is not surprising. It served as pretext for the depiction of movement, colour, energy, human exertion; at the same time, it provided an unparalleled opportunity for naturalistic description. Perhaps more importantly, the art of dance offered a metaphor for the art of painting: ‘The dance was supremely and self-evidently an art of the body. It was also chaste, artificial, the upshot of rigorous preparation and practice. Repetition took place in the dance studio tirelessly. It was not improvised but practiced in the extreme sense, to the point of pain and deformation. When a dancer returned to a position again she was like a model taking a pose; but also like a painter, making a drawing, repeating it, tracing it, learning it by heart. And when she performed, her performance was effortless in its appearance, filled with an abstract joy’. (R. Gordon & A. Forge, Degas, New York, 1988, p. 159).
Edgar Degas depicted dancers bending forward to lace or otherwise adjust their ballet slippers in a variety of poses, some of which are repeated numerous times. ‘...Replication became the governing principle of Degas's last decades...’, and to this end the artist extensively employed various means of tracing, although his "...linear production resulted in invention rather than repetition..." (R. Kendall, Degas: Beyond Impressionism, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1996, pp. 82 and 84). On occasion, the artist actually appears to relish the awkwardness of some of the positions in which he has placed his model, and even seems to exaggerate such ungainliness for expressive purposes as he develops the pose from the first drawing of the model through later traced permutations.
An inscription on the reverse of the present work suggests that the model is Josephine Gaujelin, a dancer at the Opéra in Paris and, later an actress at the Théâtre du Gymnase. Degas used her as a model on several occasions, for example as a ballerina in his La classe de danse, 1880 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and in the stunning La femme au raisin (Portrait de Josephine Gaujelin), painted in 1867 and now in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.
Edgar Degas depicted dancers bending forward to lace or otherwise adjust their ballet slippers in a variety of poses, some of which are repeated numerous times. ‘...Replication became the governing principle of Degas's last decades...’, and to this end the artist extensively employed various means of tracing, although his "...linear production resulted in invention rather than repetition..." (R. Kendall, Degas: Beyond Impressionism, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1996, pp. 82 and 84). On occasion, the artist actually appears to relish the awkwardness of some of the positions in which he has placed his model, and even seems to exaggerate such ungainliness for expressive purposes as he develops the pose from the first drawing of the model through later traced permutations.
An inscription on the reverse of the present work suggests that the model is Josephine Gaujelin, a dancer at the Opéra in Paris and, later an actress at the Théâtre du Gymnase. Degas used her as a model on several occasions, for example as a ballerina in his La classe de danse, 1880 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and in the stunning La femme au raisin (Portrait de Josephine Gaujelin), painted in 1867 and now in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.