Edgar Degas is probably best known for his paintings of dancers. Magical, poetic paintings, they beautifully showcase the ideal form of a dancer, and the idealism of dance performance. But some of my favorite Degas works are about an entirely different show--horse racing.
I've been pondering for a while the idea that horses and dancers provide similarly interesting forms for artists--lots of muscle, elegant poses, and a variety of emotions to explore. Degas is one artist who explored the similarities quite thoroughly. In my post on Marino Marini and his sculpture of the phallic horse, I do not mention his exploration of the female human form in his own dancers. Two artists with such starkly different ways of representing form seemingly take interest in the same subject.
The above example of Degas' small scale sculptures, like most of these works, was originally formed of wax. Most weren't cast into bronze until after his death in 1917. Most people agree that he used these small and quickly formed wax sculptures to observe and better understand a form before he painted it. You can see horses repeating this pose in many of his horse racing works. The work below, At the Races (c.1885-1892) shows horses in a variety of positions. Troll through a google search of "degas horses" and you'll see any number of works with similar subject, even similar composition. And he worked on his paintings of women in this way too - the motif of women bathing, usually seen from behind with a clear view of the back, is explored over and over in small wax (now bronze) sculptures. The National Gallery in DC has great examples of Degas sculpture and painting.
So why is it interesting? The sheer number of horses Degas painted, for one (and Marini sculpted). Yes, they may have sold well, but he was personally intrigued by them too. In the late 19th century, artists felt their independence and the existence of artistic license in everything from medium to subject matter more than ever before. An artist like Degas choosing to paint or sculpt two things over and over and over again is a shift in the art world--Courbet, his predecessor by a few years, painted landscapes over and over and over again, churning out hundreds. But that was to make a living. Not because they were fundamentally of interest to Courbet as an artist. Degas, and Marini, both saw in horses and dancers a fascinating subject whose forms could (and did) take years to explore.
So where does an artist like Takashi Murakami fit in? He recreates works, re-works subjects, and churns on motifs over and over again, but does he decide what his work will be, or does the market?
