EDGAR DEGAS Archives - RESPIRO E MOVIMENTO®

Using X-ray imaging, conservation scientists at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge have found that the artist repurposed the stoppers to bulk out three sculptures of dancers that he made from beeswax, shedding light on his innovative and idiosyncratic process. The dazzling pictures of Degas’s figures — which bring to mind Étienne-Jules Marey’s early mocap suit pictures — actually reveal a junkyard of sorts beneath the sculptures’ shiny surfaces: aside from corks, the innards of these dancers include everyday, lightweight material Degas would have had lying around his studio, including bits of floor. These fragments would have helped stiffen out his figures, which he built around twisted wire frames.

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In the late 1800s, the famous impressionist painter went often to the Paris Opéra Ballet to watch dancers and draw them, usually capturing the dancers in repose. Although he painted the female body in many other guises—as bathers, singers and even prostitutes, he returned again and again to the ballet. When you see his tutu clad dancers, now part of an expansive exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, you realize the fantasy and detail he poured into those paintings.

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