Museum day! AGAIN

Sry for the delay. It is obvious that I am a horrible blogger in the sense that I never blog on time. Cest la vie.

So back to the museum.

I had finished the chester dale: from impressionism to modernism exhibit and wandered into another exhibit. I had to ask a museum guide. It turns out that the exhibit was a sculpture exhibit, one of the permanent exhibits of the museum.
According to the National Gallery of Art the exhibit is: EUROPEAN SCULPTURE OF THE 14TH-19TH CENTURIES. The National Gallery of Art holds approximately 2,100 works of Western sculpture. This selection includes many of the finest examples from the period 1300-1900. It covers a wide range of materials and techniques and gives some idea of the variety of purposes that sculpture has traditionally served.









This one is for Ian. Look at that dude stomping his foot on the other dude's head. Ooooo!






If you just take out the extra a, Atalanta could be Atlanta! Go ATL!










I saw this, and besides being the only 'black' statue in the exhibit, this disturbed me somehow. Images of colonialism kept coming up in my mind...






Below is the Degas statue. I think it is a plaster cast. I'm unsure because they had a "copy" of the statue right across the way.
At the sixth impressionist exhibition in the spring of 1881, Edgar Degas presented the only sculpture that he would ever exhibit in public. The Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans, the title given by the artist, has become one of the most beloved works of art, well known through the many bronze casts produced from this unique original statuette after the artist's death. She was not so warmly received when she first appeared. The critics protested almost unanimously that she was ugly, but had to acknowledge the work's astonishing realism as well as its revolutionary nature. The mixed media of the Little Dancer, basically a wax statuette dressed in real clothes, was very innovative, most of all because she was a "modern subject": a student dancer of the Paris Opera Ballet. Marie van Goethen, the model for the figure, was the daughter of a Belgian tailor and a laundress; her working-class background was typical of the Paris Opera school's ballerinas. These dancers were known as "rats de l'opéra," literally opera rats, presumably because of the scurrying around the stage in tiny fast-moving steps. But the derogatory association of rats with dirt and sewage is unavoidable. Though privileged as a servant of art, the Little Dancer was viewed in morally unfavorable terms by her contemporaries. Young, pretty, and poor, the ballet students were understood as potential targets of male "protectors." Degas understood the predicament of the Little Dancer -- what the contemporary reviewer Joris-Karl Huysmans called her "terrible reality." The Little Dancer is a very poignant, deeply felt work of art in which a little girl of fourteen, in spite of the difficult position in which she is placed, both physically and psychologically, struggles for a measure of dignity: her head is held high, though her arms and hands are uncomfortably stretched behind her back.