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Lot Essay
Edgar Degas' Quatre danseuses à mi-corps, dated to 1889, is a pastel and charcoal drawing depicting four ballerinas from the waist up. The pretty young dancers stand close to one another, their bodies overlapping; but they do not dance in unison. Rather, they reach their arms in different directions as they informally stretch and adjust themselves. Their heads, arms, and torsos are emphatically outlined with vigorous strokes of charcoal, while their buoyant gauze tutus are loosely indicated below. Degas used brown and ochre yellow pastel to color the dancers' hair, all uniformly tied back into chignons and adorned with a violet-colored accessories. More daring, however, is the pale azure pastel pigment that the artist applied to their bodices, as well as the exposed skin of their arms, shoulders, necks and faces. Degas might have directly observed that blue iridescence, likely the reflection of artificial stage lighting, and thereafter endowed his ballerinas with an otherworldly glow.
Degas executed Quatre danseuses à mi-corps three years after the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition in Paris in 1886—to which Degas submitted only fifteen pastels works on paper. The 1886 exhibition marked an important shift in Degas' work, as he fully embraced pastel as his primary medium, rather than oil painting. These richly pigmented sticks satisfied the artist's desire for bold, rich color, but also his inclination toward rapid execution and subsequent manipulation of the soft powdery pigment on the page.
Degas’ pastels display an extraordinary range of finish, from the most fleeting, almost improvisatory sketches to highly worked, richly layered compositions of remarkable refinement. As conservator Marjorie Shelley has observed, "In some works, color was limited to sparse touches...whereas in highly finished compositions, the pastel was built up in multiple, thick layers" ("A Disputed Pastel Reclaimed for Degas: Two Dancers, Half-Length" in Metropolitan Museum Journal, vol. 51, 2016, p. 138). For art historian George Shackelford, this was the prerogative of the artist: "Degas could halt the application of pastel pigment at any stage of a work's development, whenever the work seems to him to have the proper balance of line and color....Each drawing holds the promise of a highly wrought pastel; each pastel was once a simple charcoal drawing" (Degas: The Dancers, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1984, p. 120).
Another unique element of Degas' artistic practice, facilitated by his use of pastel, was his proclivity towards repetition. Throughout his career, the artist retraced, repeated and reinvented the same poses and groups of figures over and over again. As a result of this exhaustive working method, Degas produced many images that are related to one another, on different scales and in different media (ibid., p. 110). Because Degas rejected the traditional trajectory from preparatory figure studies to fully finished oil painting, however, it is often difficult to trace the evolution of a motif within his oeuvre. For example, the poses depicted in Quatre danseuses à mi-corps also appear in subsequent charcoal sketches, like one in the Kunsthalle Bremen, or in a large-scale canvas in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.; yet in each of those works, the artist made substantial changes in terms of color and composition.
The drawing has passed through a few esteemed private collections over the course of the mid-twentieth century, including those of the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and director, Joshua Logan and his wife, the American actress Nedda Harrington; as well as the prominent New York restaurateur, Michael F. Drinkhouse. In 1978 it was acquired at auction by Johnny Carson, the iconic American television host, and his wife, the fashion model and philanthropist Joanne Carson; it remained in her possession ever since. Over the course of the twentieth century, this drawing was featured in several major American exhibitions, including Drawings by Degas, which traveled from Saint Louis to Philadelphia and Minneapolis in 1967.
Degas executed Quatre danseuses à mi-corps three years after the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition in Paris in 1886—to which Degas submitted only fifteen pastels works on paper. The 1886 exhibition marked an important shift in Degas' work, as he fully embraced pastel as his primary medium, rather than oil painting. These richly pigmented sticks satisfied the artist's desire for bold, rich color, but also his inclination toward rapid execution and subsequent manipulation of the soft powdery pigment on the page.
Degas’ pastels display an extraordinary range of finish, from the most fleeting, almost improvisatory sketches to highly worked, richly layered compositions of remarkable refinement. As conservator Marjorie Shelley has observed, "In some works, color was limited to sparse touches...whereas in highly finished compositions, the pastel was built up in multiple, thick layers" ("A Disputed Pastel Reclaimed for Degas: Two Dancers, Half-Length" in Metropolitan Museum Journal, vol. 51, 2016, p. 138). For art historian George Shackelford, this was the prerogative of the artist: "Degas could halt the application of pastel pigment at any stage of a work's development, whenever the work seems to him to have the proper balance of line and color....Each drawing holds the promise of a highly wrought pastel; each pastel was once a simple charcoal drawing" (Degas: The Dancers, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1984, p. 120).
Another unique element of Degas' artistic practice, facilitated by his use of pastel, was his proclivity towards repetition. Throughout his career, the artist retraced, repeated and reinvented the same poses and groups of figures over and over again. As a result of this exhaustive working method, Degas produced many images that are related to one another, on different scales and in different media (ibid., p. 110). Because Degas rejected the traditional trajectory from preparatory figure studies to fully finished oil painting, however, it is often difficult to trace the evolution of a motif within his oeuvre. For example, the poses depicted in Quatre danseuses à mi-corps also appear in subsequent charcoal sketches, like one in the Kunsthalle Bremen, or in a large-scale canvas in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.; yet in each of those works, the artist made substantial changes in terms of color and composition.
The drawing has passed through a few esteemed private collections over the course of the mid-twentieth century, including those of the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and director, Joshua Logan and his wife, the American actress Nedda Harrington; as well as the prominent New York restaurateur, Michael F. Drinkhouse. In 1978 it was acquired at auction by Johnny Carson, the iconic American television host, and his wife, the fashion model and philanthropist Joanne Carson; it remained in her possession ever since. Over the course of the twentieth century, this drawing was featured in several major American exhibitions, including Drawings by Degas, which traveled from Saint Louis to Philadelphia and Minneapolis in 1967.