Audio book cover
Seated woman
wiping her left hip
One old whore
One proud man
One artist to bind them.
When the painter Edgar Degas died in 1917, a surprise broke upon the art world. Discovered in his Paris studio were nearly 150 sculptures: women posing, girls dancing, horses prancing, women bathing – his usual subjects, but in three rather than two dimensions. During his lifetime Degas had only exhibited one sculpture, the celebrated Little Dancer Aged Fourteen Years, and even she remained in wax, uncast in bronze at his death. Of the newly discovered pieces – created from wax or clay, stuffed with cork mats, pipe cleaners, wood-shavings and other bits of rubbish – half fell apart on handling. Degas himself seems not to have intended his sculpture to be cast in bronze and exhibited. Yet, in a decision that is controversial to this day, his agent and heirs commissioned Paris’s foremost bronze-founder, Hébrard, to undertake the task of casting the surviving 73. Degas’s artistic legacy was to be doubled without his consent.
The sculpture at the centre of Flesh & Bronze is the ‘Seated Woman Wiping Her Left Hip’, bringing to fictional life two people intimately connected with it: the woman who modelled for it and the man who worked on their fragile structures and cast them in bronze.
In the wings of their drama lurks M. Degas, the complex and contradictory genius who created works of art that awe and inspire and infuriate us today.
Picture Credits
Book cover image: @ Subbotina Anna, Fotolia
Sculpture: Degas, Seated woman wiping her left hip, Courtauld Collection,
Somerset House, Strand, London.