[Literature & Art] Degas, Edgar. (1834 - 1917) [Paul Valéry. (1871 - 1945)]. Degas Dance Drawing. New York: Lear Publishers. 1948. First English Language Edition. 8vo. Hardcover. 70 pp. illustrated with 4 tipped-in hand-colored plates. Numbered 676 of 1,200 numbered copies only. An internally fine copy, complete in an original, but quite worn dust jacket. Scarce.

"In his essay 'Degas Dance Drawing' (1936), Valéry sketches, by way of a series of excursions, digressions, 'sayings,' and anecdotes, far more than just the portrait of painter Edgar Degas, whom he much admired. In light of Degas's work, his ascetic and uncompromising notion of art, his steady will for perfection and his dislike of any form of sentimentality or modernist aestheticism, Valéry develops a theory of art that provides a key to understanding his own poetry as well." (Gabriele Brandstetter, "Poetics of Dance: Body, Image, and Space in the Historical Avant-Gardes," p. 238)