Lot 14 Dα

This well-documented pastel drawing was part of the group of works from the artist's estate auctioned off in Paris in 1918/1919, and it is one of his larger-format late works on paper. In terms of subject matter, Degas concentrated on a few familiar primary motifs at that time: dancers and female nudes bathing, grooming themselves or combing their hair. The ephemerality and transparency of the selected material, the graphic medium which the artist had mastered very early in his career, still granted him great experimental freedom until 1910 - when he had already reached an advanced age and in spite of his dramatically worsening eyesight - and this freedom in turn expressed itself in formal rigour, in spite of its supposedly light and weightless impression. The peculiarities of this loner - who had great technical and intuitive finesse and was already an “artist's artist” during his lifetime - had already been characterised by Mallarmé, amongst others, in 1876. He describes Degas as a “master of drawing, who seeks out delicate lineations as well as vehement and grotesque movements possessing a strange new beauty.” (cited in: Götz Adriani, Edgar Degas: Pastelle, Ölskizzen, Zeichnungen, exhib. cat., Tübingen/Berlin 1984, p. 18).
In the present work, Degas has sketched a young ballet dancer, who is arranging her long braid with her hands raised above her head. The organisation of the indications defining the motif on the sheet of paper are magnificent: the seemingly so simple construction of the half-length figure, accompanied by the unusual viewing angle down on to the figure from above and the staged, artificial lighting. The turquoise and greenish hatching varies in density and establishes intense accents of colour on the plane, against the figure. Degas evokes three-dimensional qualities, the volume of the body and - observed with his well-trained eye - a natural as well as “unbeautified” movement.
“When, with the beginning of the 20th century, parts of a young generation of artists were laying claim to an altered understanding of art, Degas - almost without being noticed - had already rejected every premise for an idealised late body of work based on perfection. With the most extreme rigour, he had combed through the incomplete, the rudimentary and fragmentary to determine its formal value; with his radical simplifications of form as well as the harsh, disturbing language of his material, he had positioned himself against a period style triumphing in the linear melodiousness of Art Nouveau. [...] It was no longer a matter of the degree to which individual parts were completely developed. The only essential thing was the formal permeation of the picture as a whole, which was predestined to contribute to the autonomy of formal systems to the same extent that Cézanne's or Monet's chromatic dispositions pointed the way to the autonomy of chromatic systems. And nowhere else had the spontaneity of the means of representation progressed so far, the freedom of composition so firmly established itself as a principle and the becoming of form made itself so evident as in Degas's late work, which never arrived at stagnation or completion.” (Götz Adriani, op. cit., Tübingen 1984, p. 96).

We would like to thank Michel Schulmann, Paris, for his kind attention and the additional information.