Secret Sculptor

Edgar Degas, the master painter of ballet dancers and race horses, and one of the giants of 19th-Century French art, was also a fine sculptor. Last week, at Manhattan's Buchholz Gallery, an exhibition of 50 rare bronzes reminded Degas devotees that the painter could model. Only one of the pieces had ever been shown during Degas' lifetime, and only after his death in 1917 were they cast in bronze.

Aristocratic, cantankerous Edgar Degas was a difficult man. He called his little ballet dancer models "rats," hit the ceiling every time he saw cut flowers, threatened mayhem if his dinner was late. He was especially touchy about his sculpture, which he fashioned over home made armatures, shaped and reshaped with a perfectionist's dissatisfaction. Renoir called him "a sculptor equal to the ancients."

The first and only sculpture he showed in a public exhibition inspired ridicule, even some alarm, in critics and public alike. That figure was the famed Ballet Dancer, Dressed (see cut). He first modeled the homely, arrogant little dancer in the nude, then, with breath-taking disregard for tradition, dressed her in linen waist and muslin skirt. The public was more amazed by the covering of this figure (solemnly exhibited like a doll dressed in real clothes) than it usually is by decent, or even indecent, exposure. Degas never again exhibited his sculpture.

Toward the end of his long life, he began to go blind, and sculpture became his only means of expression. To his exhausted eyes, his models were a mere blur. To translate forms of muscles and bone, he first had to feel their original conStruction with his hands. He used calipers to measure bare knees or arms, sometimes tore living flesh by clumsy searching for clay perfection. Augmenting a keen sense of touch with the memories of his earlier, visual studies, he continued almost to the last of his 83 years to fashion his distinctively animated dancers and horses. He worked in semisecrecy, in perishable wax and clay, left the figures scattered helter-skelter in his Paris studio.

When his dealer once proposed having one of his sculptures cast, Degas became violent. "Have it cast! Bronze is all right for those who work for eternity. My pleasure consists in beginning over & over again. Like this . . ." he shouted, and seizing a nearly finished clay dancer, mashed it into a sodden lump.

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