As the Denver Art Museum this week unveiled “Degas: A Passion for Perfection,” one of its most-anticipated exhibitions in years, a longtime researcher of the artist’s work is asserting that bronze sculptures in the show are not as advertised.
For nearly two decades, Florida lithographer Gary Arseneau has been tracking and flagging sculptures attributed to French artist Edgar Degas as problematic, largely because the artist didn’t actually make them or authorize their production.
Since at least 2001, Arseneau has let every museum and gallery displaying any of the sculptures said to be of the Impressionist-era artist know that there are several issues with how they are presented to the public.
Arseneau’s latest efforts are focused on the DAM’s new show, which opened Sunday to a sold-out audience and runs through May 20. Although the show carries dozens of Degas’ better-known works in oils, pastels and watercolors – as well as sketches, etchings and monotypes – it prominently displays eight sculptures attributed to him, and placards beneath each say as much.
But Arseneau says none of them is a Degas original but, rather, a multigenerational copy – a copy of a copy of a copy – that shouldn’t be represented as original. Rather, they should be labeled as reproductions or third-generation replicas. He bases this on ethical guidelines of the College Art Association — and endorsed by the Association of Art Museum Directors — that say bronzes made without an artist’s permission is unethical and should be considered “inauthentic.”
All of the Degas statues were cast after the artist’s death and without his permission, although they were endorsed by his heirs. Art scholars agree that Degas never intended for his original sculptures to be converted into any other medium.
“It makes me feel bad that the museum is attributing these to Degas, when they should know better,” said Arseneau. “It’s such a wonderful exhibit otherwise. Ultimately, it’s about full and honest disclosure. The cost of your ticket entitles you to know that what you’re seeing is not an original but a copy that you could just as easily see in the gift shop.”
Officials at DAM don’t buy Arseneau’s authentication arguments, but they lay at the feet of the sculptures’ lenders the responsibility of properly identifying the pieces for the viewing public.
“It’s a (multigeneration) based on the original,” said Timothy Standring, the Gates Family Foundation Curator at DAM who led the compilation of the Degas exhibit over five years. “We follow the habit of labels. I’m personally not disturbed by this.”
Museum placards at each of the eight exhibited statues clearly note they were cast after Degas’ death but make no reference to the generations removed from the original. And although the DAM catalog for the exhibit explains how new analysis has determined they are not bronze, the placard descriptions remain.
“It’s all based on the model of the (original),” Standring said. “We have not been disingenuous. We’d have to change all of our (statute) lenders.”
Arseneau points to years of misattributing the sculptures – they’ve been called bronzes for years until recent examinations have determined they are a copper alloy more closely resembling brass – as part of a culture that has run unchecked and uncorrected by museums.
“It didn’t take me long to figure out that Degas didn’t do these,” said Arseneau, who lives in Fernandina Beach, Fla. “What I’ve had to confront is people who’ve rationalized over decades that these should be called Degas. But this shouldn’t even be up for discussion.”
The CAA says issues regarding reproduction of sculptures can be thorny.
“A more complex problem of sculptural reproduction exists when the artist’s heirs or executors cast the work in a new medium other than that clearly intended by the artist as the final version of the work,” CAA says on its website. “For example, if a work that was originally carved in wood or stone was posthumously cast in bronze. In the absence of authorization from the artist, this form of moulage should also be considered as unethical.”
The issue comes up often, especially in works by Frederic Remington, one of America’s most famous bronze sculptors. Experts say his pieces are carefully marked depending on when they were cast.
“Sculptures cast during Remington’s lifetime usually show his joy in manipulating the wax in the central phase of the lost wax bronze-casting process,” said Laura Foster, director of the Frederick Remington Art Museum in Ogdensburg, N.Y. “Those cast … during the nine years his widow, Eva, survived him are also considered original works by Frederic Remington, but they are categorized as ‘estate casts.'”
Degas died in 1917 – hence the number of exhibits worldwide in celebration of the centenary of that date – and while he crafted more than 150 sculptures out of various things as diverse as wax and cork, they were not widely known until after his death and found strewn in his Paris studio.
Most of the sculptures were in disrepair, but Degas’ heirs determined about 72 could be pieced back together and restored. It is believed only 69 of those originals survive today, the bulk of them at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
Each was made with wire and cork and other materials at their core, to which Degas added additional wax and clay to round out his work, sometimes even adding other materials he had lying around. Recent X-ray studies have revealed the broad variety of items he used.
Degas’ family contracted the A.A. Hébrard Foundry in France ostensibly to produce 22 bronzes of each original. But because the originals were too fragile to cast a mold from, a second-generation wax copy was made from a gelatin mold, according to the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, Calif. That wax copy was then used for a process called “sacrificial wax,” which is melted away in the bronze casting process.
From each of the 72 wax copies came a modèle, a bronze sculpture that would be used as the basis for all the other copies that would be made thereafter. This was done in part to preserve the original, as well as having to prevent recreating a copy in wax over and over.
The use of modèles is also problematic, CAA says.
“In our opinion, a bronze made from a finished bronze, unless under the direct supervision of the artist, even when not prohibited by law and authorized by the artist’s heirs or executors, is inauthentic as it imitates, resembles, has the appearance or is a copy of the original, with or without implying deceit,” CAA’s website says.
Arseneau said the artist wasn’t a fan of the harder metals.
“Degas was not at all happy about working in bronze,” said Arseneau, a self-devoted scholar on the artist who has studied his work for years. “He was even quoted as having said it was simply too permanent.”
All the modèles are located at the Norton Simon Museum.
From them, at least 22 casts were made sometime between 1919 and 1936, one each for the family and foundry, as well as 20 for general sale. Those for sale were marked with a number, 1 through 72 for the statue, and a letter, “A” through “T” for the number of its copy. Each is known as a surmoulage and given a stamp replicating Degas’ signature as well as a foundry mark and number.
That would make 1,440 copies for sale, although a number of other foundry castings have been located outside of the original 22, according to several art journals.
Each of the eight statues on display at DAM carries the proper foundry marking, indicating that each is from the initial 20 for-sale copies made from one of the modèles at Hébrard.
Clouding the issue is a precise definition of the term “original” within the art world.
“Some individuals consider only the first bronze cast as the original and all other casts as reproductions,” according to the CAA standard on sculpture reproduction. “Although the term ‘original’ may be important to the public and to some professionals, many artists and individuals who are knowledgeable about casting place little value or only relative importance on the term.””]
One art expert contacted by The Denver Post said he viewed the sculptures as authentic Degases because they are works made directly from the artist’s originals, not later copies, although he referred to them as “post-mortem originals.”
“All (Degases) made after his death by A.A. Hébrard are considered post-mortem originals,” said art expert Gilles Perrault, head of the Louvre Museum workshop in 1975, then art restorer for the Museums of France at the Palace of Versailles from 1976 to 1984.
Five of the sculptures at the DAM exhibit are on loan from the Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge in England; two from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City; and one from the Musee d’Orsay in Paris. Two statutes in the exhibit are of the first casting of for-sale statutes from the modèle: “The Tub,” which is marked 26/A, and “Woman Arranging her Hair,” marked 50/A.
The pieces are interwoven among dozens of other works more recognizably Degas, with the intent of showing the artist’s process toward achieving perfection, Standring said. The flow from one medium to another is easily recognized when all the elements are displayed together.
“They bring us back to the core of what’s going on with Degas, with his sculpture, just as much as his prints, just as much as his lithographs,” Standring said. “When we listen to Mozart, must we listen to it on original instruments for it to be Mozart?”
Arseneau said he has written each of the statues’ lenders in the past year, each without a response, and there has been no evidence available to refute what he says is obvious: “The statues on exhibit are not Degas originals. They are copies of copies. Label them as such.”
“When the exhibition was first shown at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, Degas’s sculpture was clearly labelled as either (an original) wax model, of which the Fitzwilliam is fortunate to have three, or a bronze, cast by his heirs at the foundry in Paris after his death,” according to Emma Shaw, a spokeswoman at the museum, in an email Wednesday. “No claim exists either by the Fitzwilliam or by Denver that the bronze models on display are not posthumous. The distinction has always been made.”
Note: The story was updated at 11 a.m. Wednesday, Feb. 14. The last name of Timothy Standring, had been misspelled. Also, comments from the Fitzwilliam Museum were added.