Tag Archives: Edgar Degas

New Degas Sculptures: Real or Fakes?

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The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer

This sculpture is actually a 1922 cast done from a mixed-media sculpture by Degas modeled around 1879–80. It is bronze, but-unusually for the time-included a real bodice, skirt and hair ribbon. This unorthodox use of materials and the realistic manner of sculpting the dance student led to a divided opinion of Degas’s work at the time. He was not then known as a sculptor; indeed, he sculpted much as some artists sketch, in order to work out compositional problems rather than create a final artwork.

Degas died in 1917. This cast was made 1922. More than 150 pieces of sculpture were found in his studio, and used in limited series of 20 pieces produced by the Paris foundry of Adrien Hébrard. Given this timeline (more here), it is remarkable that “a complete set of 74 plaster sculptures of dancers, bathers and horses attributed to Edgar Degas” have recently been discovered amounting to what The Times refers to as “either one of the most extraordinary art finds of the past 100 years or one of the most exquisite frauds to be attempted.”


You know I love a good art fraud, but this one slipped under my radar, so how pleased was I when the article’s author Zoe Blackler emailed me about it yesterday? You can read her story here. The plaster casts pictured above were made, supposedly, during Degas’s life from wax models that were found in his apartment at his death. Of course, bronze statues cast from these plaster ones would be worth a huge amount of money, assuming they are genuine. (A separate argument would ask if something cast to replicate a Degas is quite the same as if Degas were alive and part of the process of creation.)

Which is the crux of the thing. The story goes that these plasters were made for a friend and forgotten about, eventually ending up in the storage at the Valsuani Foundry in 1955. Odd for them to end up there, and be discovered now. I vote fakes. But then having read Loot and all about Vermeer forgeries, of course I am suspicious. What do you think?

Absinthe as a Lifestyle: Rimbaud and other French Decadents

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“For me, my glory is but a humble ephemeral absinthe drunk on the sly, with fear of treason and if I drink no longer, it is for good reason!” – Paul Verlaine

“After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, which is the most horrible thing in the world.” – Oscar Wilde
In addition to Van Gogh, famous absinthe drinkers (make that addicts) include the French poets Rimbaud and Verlaine. A new book by Edmund White, Rimbaud, highlights the affair and drinking habits of these two poet maudits, and the Time’s review of it gives you condensed insight into the poet’s embroiled lives. Rimbaud, left,
“cultivated the lice in his hair and tried to make them jump onto other people; he smashed up heirlooms; he sold his hosts’ furniture to buy gallons of booze, especially absinthe, on which he would proceed to get blotto, waking up in pools of his own merde (one of his favourite words). Finally, he seduced Verlaine, made him abandon his wife and infant child, and led the poor sap off on a sordid set of adventures that culminated, a couple of years later, with an exasperated Verlaine shooting Rimbaud in the wrist and serving a term in prison.”
Also from Parisian society of the time–called Decadent with good reason–we have Edgar Degas’s L’absithe. Intersetingly, the French had no illusions about absinthe’s addictive nature, but rather seem drawn to and fascinated by sin. Absinthe at that time was like heroin chic of the 90s. So despite my earlier denunciation, I can see now where all the cultural stigma, and thus its sinful appeal, stems from. Absinthe was a lifestyle.