The National Gallery’s Edgar Degas Sculpture may look like your average permanent-collection catalogue, of the kind that well-funded museums are perpetually issuing and re-issuing for the sake of scholarship (and self-promotion). However, details of provenance and material history are truly fascinating when it comes to Edgar Degas. He was unusual in his materials and in the choices he made to not finish and not distribute so much of his work. His legal and intellectual heirs have proved nearly as creative in interpreting those wishes, triggering a variety of controversies. This catalogue wades into these flaps including the latest one with a passive-aggressive footnote: “A group of plasters reported to have been found in the Valsuani foundry came to our attention as work on the present catalogue was in progress. They are intentionally not included herein.” The attempt to draw such lines between “genuine” and “fake” Degas sculptures is always risky business and threatens to devolve into a charade that makes everyone involved look foolish. As Caterina Y. Pierre so aptly put it in Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide: “[The prospect of an authenticity symposium] has the potential of turning into un dîner de cons; all of the Degas bronzes, including the Hébrard casts, are posthumous, and archival records for all of the plasters and waxes are sketchy at best … all Degas’s bronzes that we look at are merely simulacra of, and have many degrees of separation from, the artist’s original materials and intent.” I wish the essayists in Edgar Degas Sculpture exhibited a bit more self-consciousness about the ironies inherent in their enterprise. I feel they missed opportunities to make observations about the nature of authenticity, a fraught subject for nearly all art historians (and scholars outside the field—witness the recent controversies over the publishing of posthumous work by Nabokov and David Foster Wallace). Perhaps such questions seemed too ethereal for such a doughty catalogue, but that’s just conservatism. That said, much “Degas sculpture” is interesting to look at on its own terms, and this catalogue provides a wealth of illustration and technical information. It gives you the blessed opportunity to decide for yourself what is real.

(Read our coverage of the other CAA Barr Award finalists: Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures: Jan Gossart’s Renaissance and Imagining the Past in France: History in Manuscript Painting, 1250–1500.)

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