This exquisite lithograph after Edgar Degas (1834–1917), titled Seated dancer, removing her slipper, originates from the 1945 folio Degas, Ten Ballet Sketches. Published by The Studio Publications, Inc., New York, rendered and printed by Albert Carman, City Island, 1945, this work reflects Degas’s sensitive mastery of line, movement, and intimate observation, capturing the grace, poise, and psychological immediacy that define his iconic ballet imagery. In Seated dancer, removing her slipper, Degas reveals gesture and inner emotion through economical contour and lyrical nuance.
Executed as a lithograph and pochoir on velin paper, this work measures 17 x 13 inches (43.18 x 33.02 cm). Signed in the plate and unnumbered as issued. Rendered and printed by Albert Carman, City Island, one of the notable American ateliers specializing in fine art lithography during the mid-20th century.
Artwork Details:
Artist: After Edgar Degas (1834–1917)
Title: Seated dancer, removing her slipper, from Degas, Ten Ballet Sketches, 1945
Medium: Lithograph and pochoir on velin paper
Dimensions: 17 x 13 inches (43.18 x 33.02 cm)
Inscription: Signed in the plate and unnumbered as issued
Date: 1945
Publisher: The Studio Publications, Inc., New York
Printer: Albert Carman, City Island, 1945
Condition: Well preserved, consistent with age and medium
Provenance: From the 1945 folio Degas, Ten Ballet Sketches, published by The Studio Publications, Inc., New York
Notes:
Excerpted from the album, Born in Paris in 1834, Edgar Degas lived, and surely loved the life of that city during most of his years. These continued somewhat sadly beyond those of most of his friends— into the debacle of the first World War, during which he died in 1917. Judging by the frequency with which he used them as models, he must have had an especial admiration for the ballet girls who followed a profession that at the time brought none of the glory and prosperity which attend it today. New aspects of the human body, revealed in movement, fascinated him. But his occupation with the simply anatomical side of his subjects never resulted in a cold interpretation. On the contrary there is a warmth and sympathy that pervades all of his work. The drawings here represent the painter in one important phase of his multi-sensitive view of life; and permit an insight which a more ambitious work might not do-into the operation of the creative process, the artist's transformation of reality as it passes through the mesh of his sensibilities. The Edition of this Portfolio is limited to MMMD examples. Rendered by Albert Carman.
About the Publication:
Degas, Ten Ballet Sketches, published in 1945 by The Studio Publications, Inc., New York, stands as one of the most elegant and scholarly mid-century American fine art folios devoted to the ballet imagery of Edgar Degas. Conceived as a high-quality interpretive portfolio, the album presents a series of lithograph-and-pochoir renderings based on Degas’s original drawings, executed with exceptional attention to tonal subtlety, contour fidelity, and the emotional interiority that defines the artist’s draftsmanship. Rendered and printed by Albert Carman on City Island, the publication embodies an American postwar effort to restore and celebrate European masterworks through meticulous handcraft and artisanal color application, honoring Degas’s distinctive line and the atmospheric delicacy of his studio-based studies. Produced in a substantial edition of MMMD examples, the portfolio offered audiences rare access to Degas’s private working drawings—images rarely seen outside institutional collections—while exemplifying the technical refinement and interpretive care characteristic of Carman’s workshop. Today, Degas, Ten Ballet Sketches remains a sought-after historical publication, valued for its craft, fidelity to Degas’s aesthetic, and its role in preserving and disseminating the artist’s intimate ballet imagery in a beautifully executed mid-century fine art format.
About the Artist:
Edgar Degas (1834–1917) was a French painter, draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor whose groundbreaking fusion of classical draftsmanship, modern experimentation, and psychological depth helped define the trajectory of Western art, positioning him as one of the most influential figures of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; renowned for his depictions of ballet dancers, racehorses, theater scenes, cafe life, domestic interiors, milliners, laundresses, and women at their toilette, Degas reimagined observational realism through radical compositional innovation—employing extreme cropping, asymmetrical framing, oblique viewpoints, and dramatic lighting that anticipated photographic and cinematic language long before these technologies shaped visual culture, and although associated with Impressionism, he rejected plein-air spontaneity in favor of studio-based discipline rooted in the linear precision of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, the expressive chromaticism of Eugene Delacroix, and the modernity of Edouard Manet while also drawing inspiration from Japanese ukiyo-e prints, classical sculpture, and early photography; his independent artistic philosophy resonated with and helped shape the innovations of Pablo Picasso, Alexander Calder, Alberto Giacometti, Salvador Dali, Joan Miro, Wassily Kandinsky, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray, whose explorations of movement, form, dream logic, abstraction, and conceptualism all find antecedents in Degas’s investigations into seriality, temporality, and the fragmented figure, and his pioneering use of pastel, monotype, and wax sculpture fundamentally transformed each medium, influencing artists from Henri Matisse, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, and Giacomo Manzu to Paula Rego, contemporary realists, experimental photographers, and choreographers; his works are held in nearly every major museum collection worldwide—including the Musee dOrsay, the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Courtauld Institute, and the National Gallery, London—affirming his central place in the history of art, and the highest auction record for Degas was achieved at Sothebys London on February 3, 2015, when Danseuses en Bleu sold for 37,033,000 GBP, cementing his status as one of the most sought-after and enduringly significant artists of the Western canon.
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