Degas, Fourteen Year Old Dancer
The sculpture is very realistic. It is not perfect, nor does it praise the beauty of the human form. On the contrary, the girl looks skinny, weak, and underdeveloped, but not to the extent to be perceived as grotesque or unnatural. The texture does not idealize the body of the girl, either. Instead of being smooth, the wax is rough and even unrealistically jagged, as is the texture of her dress and hair. She stands in a passive ballet pose, feet turned out with her right leg pressed forward, although her weight leans back. Her face is turned up, her eyes are closed and her lips are closed in a subtle frown. Her arms are joined behind her back, from the front she is an armless torso with legs, and she holds them in a self-conscious or impatient child’s pose.
Degas’ sculpture doesn’t present a ballet dancer with typical beauty, grace, or tenderness. Instead, he accomplishes a representation of the real world, an escape from the clichés that perfect everything to the point that reality starts being perceived as ugliness. The Fourteen Year-Old Dancer embodies her name well, her posture and Degas’ treatment of her form reflect the careless, carefree grace of a young girl, her body not yet developed or fully self-conscious of its femininity or power.
Dali, The Vision of the Angel
The sculpture is forty-four centimeters high and consists of a large-scale bronze thumb and fingernail, an angel, and a person. The figures are all bronze and the finger appears almost bluish-green. The size of the finger is approximately twice as large as the human, who is slightly bigger than the angel. The angel is sitting, bowed with his head resting in his hand. One of his wing’s is supported by a pin, a typical object in Dali’s art. At the center of the sculpture, a branch emerges from the finger. At the bottom of the thumb, some of the skin seems torn out and reveals a stone brick wall. The person also has branches sprouting from his head, arms, and back. The weight is supported on the left leg, where the left foot is missing and instead the leg is rooted to the ground. The person’s left arm is pointing up and right, extending into branches. The texture of the fingernail is sleek and shiny, while the rest of the sculpture is more rough and naturalistic. The person seems more roughly shaped, while the thumb and angel are relatively detailed. The finger and two figures look real even though the human’s body is not very detailed and he doesn’t have features on his face. The person’s musculature and posture suggests he is male even though no reproductive organs are shown.
Claudel, The Age of Maturity
The sculpture represents a man being taken away from a young woman by an older, winged woman. The man and winged woman stand on a slightly raised, subtly textured surface, and the younger woman kneels on a lower level, reaching for the man’s hands. The figures are naked, but the man’s privates are covered by a fabric wrapping around from the older woman. The modeling is not uniform throughout the sculpture, some features are more smoothly molded while others are rough and lack definition. His face is wrinkled in addition to being roughly textured, but his expression is calm and focused. The man’s right leg is in front of his left, supporting the weight of his body and making the figure look actively in motion. The old woman is behind him, reaching around and pulling on his arms. His left hand is still extended back to the kneeling woman, and his fingers still reach for her, but his movement away from her indicates that he this is the last point of contact. The young woman is kneeling on the ground, but her right knee is in front of her left knee, suggesting movement and her reaching for him combined with an effort to pull him back towards her if she had a solid grip on his hand.
No comments:
Post a Comment