Little Dancer Up At Auction
Sunday January 11, 2009
Sotheby's has announced that Edgar Degas' iconic bronze
Little Dancer Aged Fourteen will be included in the auction house's February 3, 2009 Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale at its
New Bond Street, London location. Furthermore, it could be yours for the low, low estimated price of $17.6 million (US). Yes, I know that's not exactly a "low" figure, but neither does
Little Dancer appear on the private market every day. She's most often seen in museum collections, after all. Which leads me to an interesting question, raised by someone in this house who's visited many a museum website:
"
Hey, how many of those Little Dancer sculptures are there, anyway?"
The answer is:
31. By foundry contract, twenty-two bronzes were to be cast from Degas' original wax + mixed-media sculpture, first exhibited to mixed reviews in 1881 at the Sixth Impressionist Salon. Apparently, though, 28
Little Dancers were cast--perhaps because collectors had shown particular advance interest in this piece. The bronzes plus two plaster casts and the wax original fill out the roster.
Degas never got around to having any of his sculptures cast during his lifetime. It's a wildly expensive process, so much so that he apparently couldn't bring himself to justify the cash outlay to create "eternal" works. Expense aside, he was never keen on the idea of bronzes, anyway. After his death, however--and as so often happens with artists' estates--his heirs (who otherwise disagreed about nearly every aspect of Oncle Edgar's personal property and assets) decided to have cast 74 of the 150 wax and mixed-media models he left in his studio. The Parisian firm A. A. Hébrard was chosen to conduct this delicate process. Each of the 74 bronze editions saw 22 castings and, of these, 20 went on the market, one went to foundry head Adrien Hébrard, and one went to the Degas heirs.
Little Dancer was the only statuette that had ever been seen in public, and is the most well-known of Degas' posthumous 3-D works. Only 10 of her castings are held in private hands nearly a century later, which is why the auction announcement is truly a "big deal." Catch her if you can!
Image Credit:
Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917)
Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, 1880-81, cast ca. 1922
Painted bronze with muslin skirt and satin hair ribbon
H. 41 1/4 in. including base (3/4 "life size")
Private Collection
Image provided by Sotheby's
Wordless Wednesday - The Coloring Page You Wanted
Wednesday January 7, 2009
© 2009 Margaret Esaak
(This is the part where we're all happy: you with the coloring page, and me not having to say "It's coming" any longer.)
See more
Wordless Wednesdays on AboutVincent, Joan and Pipilotti Ring Out 2008
Sunday January 4, 2009
Last weekend, which was
the last weekend of 2008, our intrepid Art Critic, Beth Gersh-Nesic, braved the throngs at the
Museum of Modern Art to see
Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night one last time before its New York City deinstallation. (Heads up, Amsterdam--it opens for you February 13 at the
Van Gogh Museum.) If you were lucky enough to have seen the exhibition yourself, you know how it was: a veritable Vincent nirvana but very,
very crowded. So much so that timed tickets were required.
Beth ended up with 3-1/2 hours to kill while waiting for her admission to
Van Gogh. Her New Year's gift to us is a literary walk around MoMA taking in
Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting and the Pipilotti Rist installation--the last being, I think, impossible to miss even if one tried. (Note the image. The entire MoMA atrium looks like some gigantic Swingin' '60s conversation pit.) Of course, she speaks of Vincent, too. You can get your own private tour with Beth here in her review "
Vincent, Joan and Pipilotti Ring Out 2008."
Related Viewing
Image Credit:
Installation view of Pipilotti Rist's
Pour Your Body Out (
7354 Cubic Meters) at The Museum of Modern Art, 2008.
Multichannel video projection (color, sound), projector enclosures, circular seating element, carpet.
Courtesy the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, and Hauser & Wirth Zürich London
© 2008 Pipilotti Rist
Photo: © Frederick Charles,
fcharles.com
Weekend (Theft) at Bernie's
Wednesday December 31, 2008
Isn't this a luxurious backyard? It's located in Palm Beach, Florida behind a $9.5 million home that belongs to one Bernard L. Madoff. You may have heard his name lately, in conjunction with a $50 billion Ponzi scheme, a house arrest, an associate's suicide, widespread financial ruin and so on. Anyway.
It's hard to tell from this little photo, but the chaise lounges to the left are next to the pool which, until last weekend, was also adorned with a $10K copper sculpture of two lifeguards perched on an elevated seat. A tasteful, whimsical, expensive note of Art gracing a billionaire's swimming pool, l-o-v-e-ly verdigris patina, etc., etc. Until
the sculpture went missing, as was reported by the housekeeper over the past weekend.
Now, my first thought was, "Oh, is the price of copper trending upwards this month?" because a lot of open-air sculptures (and public fixtures and old phone wires and manhole covers--ingenuity/desperation are also, sadly, trending upwards) are being spirited away these days by thieves who sell them for scrap metal. But, no! As things turned out, some
pesticide workers found the statue on December 31, unharmed, in the shrubbery near a local bike trail. And dig this, it had a note attached:
"Bernie the Swindler, Lesson: Return stolen property to rightful owners. Signed by - The Educators."
The police are investigating. I hope they will take their sweet time about it, because I'm personally delighted to see one of these Wall Street greed freaks suffer even a small karmic dope slap. Mr. Madoff is getting his sculpture back in time for the Securities and Exchange Commission to include it on a list of his personal assets. Mr. Madoff's investors are going to be less fortunate about getting
their assets back.
Related Reading:
Image credit:The back of a home that records show is owned by Bernard L. Madoff is seen December 15, 2008 in Palm Beach, Florida. Madoff is suspected of leading a $50 billion Ponzi scheme. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
