Degas's Sculpture a Reply to "arabesques in Bronze"

Mr. Gardner's article on Degas's sculpture, "Arabesques in Bronze," in the January, 1946, issue of the Metropolitan Museum Bulletin raises several interesting and controversial questions. Mr. Gardner contends that modeling became the painter's "principal amusement as the years closed about him." Had he studied the present writer's catalogue of Degas's work in sculpture more carefully, he might have seen that Degas worked in clay or wax throughout the years, from as early as 1865 (he was then thirty-one), and that at least after 188o, according to the testimony of Paul Durand-Ruel, he devoted nearly as much time to modeling as to painting. Does it not seem rather peremptory to assert that a man as intensely conscious of his work as Degas should have spent so much time and effort on a mere "pleasant pastime"? The fact that increasing eye trouble caused Degas to concentrate exclusively on sculpture during his later years by no means justifies the conclusion quoted by Mr. Gardner, according to which the artist, had he not been handicapped by semi-blindness, "would have recorded his ideas in his proper medium-in chalk or pencil." Quite to the contrary, when he could no longer see, Degas knew he would also have to give up modeling; for work that was but approximately right would never have been a consolation-even less an amusementfor one who rarely found satisfaction in perfection itself. The extremely ingenious display of photographs on pages 132-133 of the January Bulletin shows precisely with what care and logic Degas studied the various phases of an arabesque in order to exploit all the possibilities he was aware of in his medium. It seems hardly warranted, therefore, to claim, as Mr. Gardner does, that Degas's statuettes "cannot be considered as serious works in sculpture." In my opinion there can be no doubt that Degas was never anything but serious when his art was concerned. Referring to an opinon which I had expressed in my catalogue and which he calls "romantic," Mr. Gardner sees in Degas's disregard for properly designed armatures a further proof that the artist "regarded these little experiments in clay as sketches, not as finished works of art, and that he did not care to have the serious craftsman's regard for technique interfere with a mere pleasant pastime." This view conflicts singularly with the fact, reported by witnesses, that Degas was subject to fits of rage whenever a statuette collapsed. If Degas chose nevertheless not to heed Bartholome's technical advice and preferred his own empirical methods, it was doubtless because the difficulties with which he struggled belonged, in the words of Paul Valery, to the order of difficulties, "incomprehensible to most people (and even to some of the trade), which the true artist invents and imposes upon himself." According to Denis Rouart, son and grandson of intimate friends of Degas, the artist "was not discouraged by difficulties and problems which he encountered. To the contrary, he liked to face them and might even have created them if they had not existed." Unwilling to approach Degas's statuettes as sculptures, Mr. Gardner proposes that we consider them as "drawings in clay," pointing out that some persons who have written about them have mentioned the word draftsmanship. This suggests a fallacious conclusion. It might oblige Mr. Gardner to classify as relief every painting in connection with which there has ever been mention of modeling. (It would lead too far to point out here that those who make what Mr. Gardner calls "sculpture in the academic sense of that word" proceed frequently from line instead of from volume and that Degas's statuettes are not the expression of a