Conserving Edgar Degas

I've been working as a conservator for 25 years, almost exclusively with costume. One of the curators approached me about Degas' Dancer. He said, the condition of the skirt is very poor, so it needs to be replaced. And I, of course, went to look at the sculpture, and I found that actually, from a conservation standpoint, the skirt was in very good condition, but it had very meticulously been constructed to look very dirty and tattered. I had to figure out what is it that he objects to that we should try to correct in a new version of the skirt. The sculpture was very controversial when it was originally displayed in 1881. It was too realistic. The original sculpture was made of wax. All of the clothing was fabric. The wax sculpture had a human hair wig on it. After he died, the sculpture was cast in bronze in the 1920s and 1930s by his heirs. The hair ribbon and the fabric tutu could not be cast, so they were added as a fabric element by the bronze foundry. The decision on what those skirts looked like didn't have anything to do with Degas. This was 40 years after the sculpture had been made, and they made the choice to patinate the bronze with a very dark color that would correspond to the aged color of the wax, and also to make the skirt the way that it appeared at that time, which was extremely dirty and tattered. A lot of the fabric had been lost, so the skirt was much shorter than it had originally been. When the skirts wore out, they were just replaced by whoever owned the sculptures. That was the case with the one at the Metropolitan Museum, the skirt that was on it when I started the project was at least the third one that had been made in 1998. It did give me a sense of freedom. Usually we're conserving objects that are still extant. We were really starting from zero. Our particular decision was to look to the wax sculpture as a model. Part of the process was researching what the tutu on the sculpture really looked like, what the dancers in the period actually wore. The tutu was a bouffant garment, this full, airy and buoyant bell shape. We also wanted to make the length of the tutu historically accurate, knee length. I also wanted a certain translucency in the fabric. Originally we were thinking of using silk tulle, the fabric that's very much associated with tutus. That's what they're made of today, nylon tulle. We found that what had originally been used was actually a cotton tarlatan, which is a very heavily starched, open-weave cotton fabric. So we instead decided that we would use that or something that would emulate that. Since it's not a full-scale sculpture, if it's too stiff, it will look very fake. We ended up picking a finer grade for the underneath layers of the skirt, and then a more open weave for the outer layers of the skirt. Originally the skirt on the sculpture was described as being white. The bronzes had been made to look aged already, so there was no way we could put a white skirt on the dancer and have it look natural. We picked a color that resembled something that started out white and has aged naturally. And then I went back and airbrushed in some darker areas on the fabric so there would be some variation in the color. But we weren't trying to emulate a really disintegrated appearance of the original skirt. Fashion will change in 20 years, and somebody will look at the skirt and say, that's hideous, and we need a new one. I have this long history with looking at fashion and a good eye for what looks right and what doesn't look right. I grew up near Boston, so they have a cast of the sculpture in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. And I remember as a child being very distressed by this combination of fabric and sculpture. It's something that really stuck with me, that something about it didn't look right. If we can bring something to it now that makes the skirt really look harmonious with the sculpture and shows that we've paid attention to the way that Degas depicted dancers and the sense of movement, that will really add to the way people view the sculpture. That's my hope.