Museums continue to exhibit Degas’ bronzes, often with great fanfare, even though there's no such thing as Degas bronzes. Last year theTel-Aviv Museum showed them. This year Tampa Museum of Art will be showing them. Never mind that Degas never used bronze nor participated in the myriad aesthetic decisions in casting and patinating bronzes. Never mind that Degas didn’t even like bronzes.
What these museums are showing, then, are castings of some Degas wax studies - executed after he died. In other words, they're the stuff of museum-store fare, not the original art that the museum charge fees to see.
With the ongoing museum shows of Degas bronzes, you’d never guess that scholars have been disputing their authenticity for years, pointing out again and again that they're reproductions.
The revelation became public in 2000 during the Smith College exhibit of Degas bronzes at the Cummer Museum of Art in Jacksonville, Florida. Times-Union arts writer Charlie Patton reported the objections of Fernandina Beach printmaker Gary Arseneau, who called the bronze works fakes, saying, "Dead people don't make art." He also faulted the artist's signatures on the posthumous castings.
But the art world didn’t need Arseneau to say that. A 1995 College Art Association article by Roger J. Crum said that the Degas bronzes aren't even direct reproductions of the original, but rather two generations after the wax original. Plaster molds of the originals were used for the bronzes, which would make them reproductions of reproductions.
It was after Degas died that his dealer, Durand-Ruel, found 150 pieces of wax figures in the artist's studio and made a deal with Degas' brother and sister to cast 74 of them in bronze in an edition of 22.
This shouldn't have happened, said Crum, who based his conclusion on a conversation that critic François Thiebault-Sisson recalled having with Degas. The artist told the critic that he modeled the waxworks merely as exercises for his paintings: "Since no one will ever see these efforts, no one should think of speaking about them," Degas is quoted as saying. "After my death, all that will fall apart by itself."
Posthumous bronzing has been such a sticking point in the art world that in 1974 the College Art Association put out a code governing the issue called Ethics and Guidelines. Endorsed by the Association of Museum Directors, it says that "all transfers into new materials, unless specifically condoned by the artists ... should be considered as inauthentic or counterfeit. Unauthorized casts of works in the public domain cannot be looked upon as accurate presentations of the artist's achievement."
Literature from the National Gallery of Art, holder of the largest public collection of Degas' original wax sculptures, notes that Degas didn't like bronzes: "The medium was too permanent and ill-suited to the way he worked, which involved constant changing and revision."
Smith College's exhibit catalog rightly characterized Degas' waxworks as "preparatory notions, nothing more." One wonders how many museum goers view bronzed "preparatory notions" as preparatory.
In a 1996 edition of Art News magazine, Robert Kashey, a member of the committee that wrote the College Art Association Ethics and Guidelines, said the situation has not improved: "Institutions have gone along with posthumous casting ... exhibiting them and having people try to appreciate them as original casts.... So we really have a problem because this is all condoned – in fact, sometimes it's celebrated. It has not been good for sculpture."
Also in the Art News article, Kirk Varnedoe, then Director of the Painting and Sculpture Department at New York's Museum of Modern Art, called the issue of posthumous bronzes "the messiest subject alive. If you decide once the heart beats for the last time, that's it – nothing ever produced after that is authentic – it makes your life much simpler."
You'd think.
Five years years ago, the Milwaukee Art Museum mounted a show of 73 Degas bronzes. And as though to give greater importance to the work, Degas' "Little Dancer Aged 13" was set on a pedestal in a room by itself. This, for sculpture called third-generation reproductions.
Never mind all that. In the words of Milwaukee Art Museum Director David Gordon, "The Museum is proud to bring the beauty of Edgar Degas' famous sculptures to visitors."
The rhubarb goes on without end, whirring and lagging, tantamount to shadow slashing.
Note: My new book "Sculpture Off The Pedestal" - a behind-the-scenes look at 25 sculptors - is available at Amazon.com, where you can also post a review.
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