Instruct: Given a question, retrieve documents that can help answer the question.
Query: When did Degas sculpt his "Little Dancer"?
Degas's only showing of sculpture during his life took place in 1881 when he exhibited "The Little Dancer of Fourteen Years". A nearly life-size wax figure with real hair and dressed in a cloth tutu, it provoked a strong reaction from critics, most of whom found its realism extraordinary but denounced the dancer as ugly. In a review, J.-K. Huysmans wrote: "The terrible reality of this statuette evidently produces uneasiness in the spectators; all their notions about sculpture, about those cold inanimate whitenesses ... are here overturned. The fact is that with his first attempt Monsieur Degas has revolutionized the traditions of sculpture as he has long since shaken the conventions of painting."
Pablo Picasso was perhaps the most famous artist in Paris, but he shared the spotlight with a remarkable group of others, including the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuși, the Belgian René Magritte, the Italian Amedeo Modigliani, the Russian émigré Marc Chagall, the Catalan and Spanish artists Salvador Dali, Joan Miró, Juan Gris, and the German surrealist and Dadaist Max Ernst. Several major artistic movements flourished in Paris at this time, including Cubism, Surrealism, and Art Deco. The American art patron Gertrude Stein, resident in Paris, played an important role in encouraging and buying works of Picasso and other artists of the period.
In spring 1839, the daguerreotype was introduced into the United States by an Englishman named D.W. Seager, who took the first photograph of a view of St. Paul’s Church and a corner of the Astor House in Lower Manhattan in New York City. Painter and inventor Samuel Finley Breese Morse had met Louis Daguerre in Paris in the spring of 1839, becoming the first American to see his photographic process and becoming enamored with it as a result. When he returned to the United States later that year, he enthusiastically promoted the daguerreotype while hailing Seager's prototypical image. Morse had painted "The Gallery of the Louvre" in 1833, and the appeal of the medium of the daguerreotype was an obvious one to him: it was a means of making faithful copies of artworks, in addition to anything else that would be still in front of the slow eye of the camera.
Invented by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre and introduced worldwide in 1839, daguerreotype was almost completely superseded by 1860 with new, less expensive processes yielding more readily viewable images. In the late 20th century, there was a revival of daguerreotypy by a small number of photographers interested in making artistic use of early photographic processes.
The pavilion's centerpiece was The Little Mermaid, marking the first time that the iconic statue had left Copenhagen. The Little Mermaid was displayed in the center of an artificial pond within the pavilion. The original plans for the exhibit called for seawater from Copenhagen's harbor to be transported, but that idea was dropped because the water would have turned rotten by the time it had reached Shanghai. The intention of transporting the seawater with the statue was to give a more authentic experience to spectators. The pavilion and Little Mermaid statue were unveiled on 25 April 2010, accompanied by a performance by singer Thomas Helmig, who performed a song called "Swim", written expressly for the statue's debut. Denmark's Tax Minister Troels Lund Poulsen also delivered a speech to mark the opening of the pavilion.
With the development of the daguerreotype in the 1840s, the role of the portrait painter declined in general, because it was now much easier and much cheaper to have one's likeness presented in a visual format. While many portrait painters lost business in competition with the daguerreotype, Billings instead began to produce daguerreotype prints himself. It is not known exactly which prints were made by Moses Billings, as daguerreotypes were usually signed, when signed at all, along the side of the plate. Due to the traditional storing methods of daguerreotype plates, even this signature usually quickly became illegible. However, it has been generally noted, or at least hypothesized, that his daguerreotype prints showed a level of talent and artistry above that of amateur daguerreotypists. Though it is not known exactly which prints were his, it is known that he had largely abandoned the process by the 1850s. Even after he stopped making daguerreotypes, he did continue to paint people's portraits on canvas.
Modernist sculptors largely missed out on the huge boom in public art resulting from the demand for war memorials for the two World Wars, but from the 1950s the public and commissioning bodies became more comfortable with Modernist sculpture and large public commissions both abstract and figurative became common. Picasso was commissioned to make a maquette for a huge -high public sculpture, the so-called "Chicago Picasso" (1967). His design was ambiguous and somewhat controversial, and what the figure represents is not clear; it could be a bird, a horse, a woman or a totally abstract shape.
It is said that Daguerre has found the means to collect, on a plate prepared by him, the image produced by the camera obscura, in such a way that a portrait, a landscape, or any view, projected upon this plate by the ordinary camera obscura, leaves an imprint in light and shade there, and thus presents the most perfect of all drawings ... a preparation put over this image preserves it for an indefinite time ... the physical sciences have perhaps never presented a marvel comparable to this one.
A further clue to fixing the date of invention of the process is that when the Paris correspondent of the London periodical "The Athenaeum" reported the public announcement of the daguerreotype in 1839, he mentioned that the daguerreotypes now being produced were of considerably better quality than the ones he had seen "four years earlier".
Ballet was further shaped by the French "ballet de cour", which consisted of social dances performed by the nobility in tandem with music, speech, verse, song, pageant, decor and costume. When Catherine de' Medici, an Italian aristocrat with an interest in the arts, married the French crown heir Henry II, she brought her enthusiasm for dance to France and provided financial support. Catherine's glittering entertainments supported the aims of court politics and usually were organized around mythological themes. The first "ballet de cour" was the "Ballet de Polonais." This Ballet was performed in 1573 on the occasion of the visit of the Polish Ambassador. It was choreographed by Balthasar de Beaaujoyeulx and featured an hour-long dance for sixteen women, each representing a French province. "Ballet Comique de la Reine" (1581), which was also choreographed and directed by Balthasar de Beaujoyeulx, was commissioned by Louise of Lorraine, queen consort of King Henry III, son of Catherine, to celebrate the marriage of Henry's favorite the Duke de Joyeuse to Marguerite de Lorraine, the sister of Queen Louise. The ballet lasted for more than five hours and was danced by twenty four dancers: twelve naiades and twelve pages.
David is a masterpiece of Renaissance sculpture created in marble between 1501 and 1504 by the Italian artist Michelangelo. "David" is a marble statue of a standing male nude. The statue represents the Biblical hero David, a favoured subject in the art of Florence.
Pablo Ruiz Picasso (; ; 25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, stage designer, poet and playwright who spent most of his adult life in France. Regarded as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" (1907), and "Guernica" (1937), a dramatic portrayal of the bombing of Guernica by the German and Italian airforces during the Spanish Civil War.
The statue "Peace" on the Dewey Arch was modelled on Fitsimmons by the sculptor Daniel Chester French. A statue of Fitzsimmons has also stood in the city centre of Timaru, New Zealand, since 1987. It was commissioned by New Zealand millionaire boxing fan Bob Jones and sculpted by Margriet Windhausen.
Martin Daguerre was born around 1524 in the Basque town of Hendaye. In 1527, his family moved to the village of Artigat in the Pyrenees of southwestern France. They changed their name to Guerre. When he was about fourteen years old, Martin married Bertrande de Rols, the daughter of a well-off family. The marriage was childless for eight years until a son was born.
The Galleria dell'Accademia has housed the original "David" by Michelangelo since 1873. The sculpture was allegedly brought to the Accademia for reasons of conservation, although other factors were involved in its move from its previous outdoor location on Piazza della Signoria. The original intention was to create a 'Michelangelo museum', with original sculptures and drawings, to celebrate the fourth centenary of the artist's birth. Today, the gallery's small collection of Michelangelo's work includes his four unfinished "Prisoners", intended for the tomb of Pope Julius II, and a statue of Saint Matthew, also unfinished. In 1939, these were joined by a "Pietà" discovered in the Barberini chapel in Palestrina, though experts now consider its attribution to Michelangelo to be dubious.
Paris was the birthplace of modern photography. A process for capturing images on plates coated with light-sensitive chemicals had been discovered by Nicéphore Niépce in 1826 or 1827 in rural France. After this death in 1833, the process was refined by the Paris artist and entrepreneur Louis Daguerre, who had invented the Paris Diorama. His new method of photography, called the daguerrotype, was publicly announced to a joint meeting of the French Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris on 19 August 1839. Daguerre gave the rights to the invention to the French nation, which offered them for free to any user in the world. In exchange, Daguerre received a pension from the French state. The daguerrotype became the most common method of photography during the 1840s and 1850s.
The main bronze sculpture, showing Moliere seated under a portico under an imposing arch, is by Bernard-Gabriel Seurre (1795–1875) and cast by the fonderie Eck et Durand. Under him is an inscription flanked by two marble female sculptures by Jean-Jacques Pradier (1792–1852), 'Serious Comedy' and 'Light Comedy' - each holds a scroll listing Moliere's works. Right at the bottom are lion masks, from which the water pours into a semi-circular basin. A commemorative medal for the fountain's inauguration was designed by François Augustin Caunois in 1844 - an example of it is in the musée Carnavalet (ND 0367).
Vincent Willem van Gogh (; 30 March 185329 July 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who is among the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art. In just over a decade he created about 2,100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings, most of them in the last two years of his life. They include landscapes, still lifes, portraits and self-portraits, and are characterised by bold colours and dramatic, impulsive and expressive brushwork that contributed to the foundations of modern art. However, he was not commercially successful and his suicide at 37 followed years of mental illness and poverty.
The painting is thought to be a portrait of Lisa Gherardini, the wife of Francesco del Giocondo, and is in oil on a white Lombardy poplar panel. It had been believed to have been painted between 1503 and 1506; however, Leonardo may have continued working on it as late as 1517. Recent academic work suggests that it would not have been started before 1513. It was acquired by King Francis I of France and is now the property of the French Republic, on permanent display at the Louvre Museum in Paris since 1797.
By this time, Picasso had constructed a huge Gothic home, and could afford large villas in the south of France, such as Mas Notre-Dame-de-Vie on the outskirts of Mougins, and in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur. He was an international celebrity, with often as much interest in his personal life as his art.
Picasso was one of 250 sculptors who exhibited in the 3rd Sculpture International held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in mid-1949. In the 1950s, Picasso's style changed once again, as he took to producing reinterpretations of the art of the great masters. He made a series of works based on Velázquez's painting of "Las Meninas". He also based paintings on works by Goya, Poussin, Manet, Courbet and Delacroix.
On 10 May 1999, Cézanne's painting "Rideau, Cruchon et Compotier" sold for $60.5 million, the fourth-highest price paid for a painting up to that time. As of 2006, it was the most expensive still life ever sold at an auction. One of Cézanne's "The Card Players" was sold in 2011 to the Royal Family of Qatar for a price variously estimated at between $250 million ($ million today) and possibly as high as $300 million ($ million today), either price signifying a new mark for highest price for a painting; surpassed only by Leonardo da Vinci's "Salvator Mundi" in November 2017.
Ballet is a formalized form of dance with its origins in the Italian Renaissance courts of 15th and 16th centuries. Ballet spread from Italy to France with the help of Catherine de' Medici, where ballet developed even further under her aristocratic influence. An early example of Catherine's development of ballet is through 'Le Paradis d' Amour', a piece of work presented at her daughter's wedding, Marguerite de Valois to Henry of Navarre. Aristocratic money was responsible for the initial stages of development in 'court ballet', as it was royal money that dictated the ideas, literature and music used in ballets that were created to primarily entertain the aristocrats of the time. The first formal 'court ballet' ever recognized was staged in 1573, 'Ballet des Polonais'. In true form of royal entertainment, 'Ballet des Polonais' was commissioned by Catherine de' Medici to honor the Polish ambassadors who were visiting Paris upon the accession of Henry of Anjou to the throne of Poland. In 1581, Catherine de' Medici commissioned another court ballet, "Ballet Comique de la Reine", however it was her compatriot, Balthasar de Beaujoyeulx, who organized the ballet. Catherine de' Medici and Balthasar de Beaujoyeulx were responsible for presenting the first court ballet ever to apply the principles of Baif's Academie, by integrating poetry, dance, music and set design to convey a unified dramatic storyline. Moreover, the early organization and development of 'court ballet' was funded by, influenced by and produced by the aristocrats of the time, fulfilling both their personal entertainment and political propaganda needs.
After Degas' death, his heirs (brother and sister's children) made the decision to have the bronze repetitions of "La Petite Danseuse" and other wax and mixed-media sculptures cast. The casting took place at the Hébrard foundry in Paris from 1920 until 1936 when the Hébrard foundry went bankrupt and closed. Thereafter, "Hébrard" Degas "Little Dancer" bronzes were cast at the Valsuani foundry in Paris until the mid-1970s. Sixty-nine of Degas' wax sculptures survived the casting process. One copy of "La Petite Danseuse" is currently owned by the creator and owner of Auto Trader, John Madejski. He stated that he bought the sculpture by accident. That copy was sold for £13,257,250 ($19,077,250) at Sotheby's on February, 3rd 2009. Another Hébrard "Little Dancer" bronze failed to sell at a November 2011 auction at Christie's.
The sculpture is one-third life size and was originally sculpted in wax, a somewhat unusual choice of medium for the time. It is dressed in a real bodice, tutu and ballet slippers and has a wig of real hair. All but a hair ribbon and the tutu are covered in wax. The 28 bronze repetitions that appear in museums and galleries around the world today were cast after Degas' death. The tutus worn by the bronzes vary from museum to museum.
Realistic wax figures with real hair and real clothes had also been popular in religious, Folk, and fine arts for centuries before Degas created his "Little Dancer".
The foundation owns a complete collection of 74 bronze sculptures by the French Impressionist Edgar Degas, including a casting of "The Little Dancer Aged Fourteen." According to a number of experts, Degas, after meeting with criticism for his first sculpture "Little Dancer," had privately accumulated plasters for sculptures that were not found until after his death. They feature dancers, horses, bathers, etc. Apart from the M.T. Abraham Foundation, as of 2010 only four museums worldwide have near-complete collections.