isn’t it amazing how the width of the skirt, the heft and color and lift of it, changes the whole tone of the sculpture? Her previous tutu sagged on her body, and I remember when I saw it I thought of wilting flowers—the crushed quality of the fabric and the multilayered brown just added to that sad, wistful effect; I thought Degas was conveying a kind of loneliness, a sense of being left out in the cold, a girl not quite a ballerina.
and then the new skirt! She looks like a Dior model. She fits with other paintings Degas made of dancers, and her whole pose reads completely differently. She looks like she's about to lift off or float away. The skirt is still aged but it’s no longer tattered. She's a dandelion now, ready to happily dance away, not a girl kicked out of the ball. It’s shocking that her pose hasn’t changed at all, because the entire sculpture reads differently now.
And fascinating, too, that we don’t really know what Degas “intended.” All the changes that have happened to this sculpture over the years is a collective vision of what a Degas sculpture should be. From this video, it sounds like he didn’t plan for the bronze (which adds the tone of memory, solidity, history). He didn’t envision the skirt being dyed to match the body or its decay. It sounds like we’re not even sure how full he made the skirt originally—this conservator is going off of historically accurate looks from the time, ignoring whether degas might have intentionally flouted those to make a separate point. This is a Theseus’s ship of a masterpiece. Gorgeous and weird and totally divorced from what it started as.
