Word: wax
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...Learning the stern teachings of the church fathers: "Christ is our only guide to happiness . . . our father, our leader, our light, our food, our redemption, our way, our truth, our life." Fra Dominici exhorted the young monks: "As the years of tender youth flow by, the soft wax may take on any form. Stamp on it the impress not of Narcissus, Myrrha, Phaedra or Ganymede, but of the crucified Christ and of the saints." It was to this effort that Fra Angelico, for whom the goal both of life and art was "the contemplation and realization of Beauty," devoted...
...Moscow, by the gilt and the grandiosity, and see no incongruity in the joylessness of Muscovites. At the red granite tomb of Lenin and Stalin in Red Square, day after day they queue behind their guides waiting for the moment to file silently past the embalmed Communist leaders, their wax en faces still faintly saturnine. Here, as at the Bolshoi, the Western visitor, brought quickly to the head of the line, may see a man or a woman weeping. He will understand then the real power of Moscow, the new Mecca of the East...
...must learn a blind man's trade," French Impressionist Edgar Degas said sadly toward the end of his life. Faced with rapidly failing eyesight, he turned increasingly to sculpture in wax as the one remaining form left for him in his life in the twilight. Last week 69 of Degas' original wax statues, preserved over the years by a French foundry and only recently come to light, were for the first time on display at Manhattan's Knoedler Gallery...
Encased in the wax forms is the same magic world of ballet dancers, women bathing and race track studies of jockeys and thoroughbreds that Degas made famous with his paintings. But the studies are far from being ancient relics from th past. The wax figurines by their very defects-the mark of being studio studies their unfinished surfaces, even the thumb prints left by Degas' nervous, racing hands as he worked-gain a sense of startling immediacy...
Degas never meant his wax studies to be seen. He doubted his own results wrote a friend at the time: "I never seem to achieve anything with my blasted sculpture." He often journeyed to the Hébrard Foundry on the outskirts of Paris to pick up pointers. In his lifetime, he exhibited only one statue, an awkward ballet rat dressed in a real gauze tutu and hair ribbon. But even this and a few other waxworks caused his friend Renoir to exclaim: "Why, Degas is the greatest living sculptor." Degas was not so sure, once remarked: "To be survived...