KEY Milwaukee - Feature Story

Museum enhances Degas Sculptures
with drawings, paintings and pastels

THE MILWAUKEE ART MUSEUM’s first major exhibition of French Impressionist works gives visitors an opportunity to view the works of Edgar Degas in two and three dimensions.

Degas Sculptures, here through June 5, includes all 73 bronze sculptures by the great French Impressionist master. Illustrating its creativity, the Museum has enhanced this exclusive Midwestern venue for the exhibition with nearly 20 of Degas’ important drawings, paintings and pastels.

“The Museum is proud to bring the beauty of Edgar Degas’ famous sculptures to visitors,” said David Gordon, CEO and Director of the Museum. “ Museum-goers are sure to enjoy the breathtaking exhibition, enhanced only in Milwaukee by great Impressionist paintings, pastels and drawings.”

The collection of sculptures comes from the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Brazil, and is one of only four complete sets of the artist’s bronzes in existence. Featured among Degas’ celebrated bathers, horses and dancers is one of the icons of 19th Century art, Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen. This well-known masterpiece was the only sculpture Degas (1834-1917) exhibited in his lifetime, when he included it in the sixth exhibition of Impressionist art in Paris in 1881.

The artist’s provocative and groundbreaking mixing of media, with its surprisingly harsh realism, was not well received. Its rejection and condemnation by a number of prominent critics discouraged Degas from ever publicly showing sculpture again. Sculpture remained his private, life-long passion, but a pursuit known only to his friends and fellow artists.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir proclaimed Degas “the greatest living sculptor,” and Mary Cassatt said that “he will live to be greater as a sculptor than as a painter.” After the death of Degas in 1917 more than 150 sculptures were found in his studio. Most of the works were formed from clay and wax with wire skeletons and had reached various degrees of fragility. Heirs decided to authorize a series of bronze casts made from 73 of the small figurines. The series was completed before 1921 when it was first exhibited in Paris.

The nearly 20 two-dimensional works on view allow visitors to glimpse the work of Degas through different media and to show how closely much of his sculptural work was related to his experimental attitude toward movement and form and his better-known work as a painter. Many of the sculpted dancers, bathers and horses can be related to similar objects and compositions found among the artist’s paintings and pastels.

The exhibit’s coordinator is Laurie Winters, curator of earlier European art. A 288-page hardcover exhibition catalogue contains more than 300 illustrations and is available in the Museum Store or online at www.mam.org.

The exhibition’s appearance in Milwaukee is sponsored by Northwestern Mutual Foundation and Argosy Foundation. Tickets are $12 for adults, $10 for seniors, $8 for students. Children under 12 are free. The ticket includes general Museum admission. Exhibition-related programs include an experts’ lecture series, ballet dancers practicing in the exhibition and an all horses day.

Located at 700 N. Art Museum Dr. on the shore of Lake Michigan, the Museum includes the new Santiago Calatrava-designed pavilion completed in October 2001 and named Time magazine’s “Best Design of 2001.” Earlier this year, a drawing of the Calatrava-designed pavilion was selected for the official logo of Milwaukee’s promotional efforts.

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